According to Wired, the EU is floating the idea of a complete ban on gasoline and diesel powered cars in European city centers by 2050.

An ambitious set of goals, laid out in the document “Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area” (PDF), calls for a gradual phase-out of gas-guzzling vehicles in favour of electric vehicles and improved rail networks. The EU wants to “halve the use of conventionally-fuelled cars in urban transport by 2030” before getting rid of them entirely by 2050.

This doesn’t strike me as all that ambitious. We can and will switch to electric, natural gas, and propane powered vehicles a lot faster than that if the economics begin to favor it. And they will if, for example, distributed solar energy comes online in a big way. And I expect to see that in decade, not four decades. However, just the fact that most people and governments see it as ambitious illustrates exactly why it is good to get it out there and in peoples’ minds – it may be more likely to happen that way.