The Northern European country Norway is looking to reduce its carbon footprint with 40% by 2025 and has a plan for its goal. Ola Elvestuen, a member of the Norwegian Parliament and chairman of the Standing Committee on Energy, stated at a conference in Portland, Oregon last week, that Norway is set to reduce its carbon emissions and that it is implementing a series of policies to do that. Because Norway is already 97% reliant on hydroelectric power, it does not have coal burning factories to close in order to fulfill its plan. And as the car sector accounts for one third of Norway’s carbon emission, it just seemed like the legitimate choice for the massive carbon reduction to turn everything as electric as possible.

Oslo, Norway’s capital city, has almost a third of the country’s inhabitants and will become an example for the rest of the cities there and other countries in the world for pollution reduction implementation. The plan includes that all municipal vehicles be electric by 2015, all public transit to be fossil-fuel-free through 2020, all taxis to have zero-emissions by 2022 and up to 100% of the new cars sold in the country to be emission-free until 2025.

In order for its citizens to drive electric cars, Norway has offered incentives so that an EV does not pay any road tax or registration fee, no sales tax or value-added tax and the corporate tax is lower for electric cars. Moreover, the public parking is free, the rolls on roads, bridges and tunnels are also free, ferry transport & public charging require no costs. Sign us up for that! These incentives became successful with 1/5 of all new electric cars being electric and EV sales doubling for the past three years. The EVs in Norway stand for 2.5% of the cars there. In comparison, the U.S. would need to add 5 million electric cars to its traffic to equal that percentage.

Source: www.norwaynews.com
Photo: Visit Norway