Egregoros

Taxes. Petroleum is taxed very heavily, but if it doesn't come out of the ground, it doesn't get the tax.

The official story is carbon, but I tend to think France just hates dependence on foreign sourced energy.

@cjd @bonifartius some of the savings is lost by less mileage. Ethonal contains 30 percent less energy than same volume of gasoline.

Yup, but at 73 cents a liter, it's still winning against gasoline...

@cjd i think the ethanol and seed oil based stuff is less taxed here as well. problem is that for those you use up fossil fuel for the fertilizers :)

if not everyone was full retard in germany they'd take the taxes and build up a coal liquefaction infrastructure again. guess we just like being ripped off by everyone here.

Same here, if they weren't retarded they'd be building more nuclear. They just brought 2 online, but those they started building in 2007. You can't take that long to build something, it's just not sustainable.

@cjd if they'd just ignored the rest of EU and did some joint ventures without childish infighting benelux/france/germany/spain/italy could pull off nice projects

EU isn't really the problem. Problem is nuclear reactors are hard to build, and ability to build a reactor is kind of a shit-test for corruption and inefficiency. If you are not 100% on top of your game, building a reactor goes from hard to impossible.