Sounds like the US and requirements for fuel additives. Some scientist showed a way to make tiny amounts of a gasoline equivalent using some bacteria and cellulose, so congress passed a law requiring all gasoline to have a certain percentage of cellulose derived fuel additives.
Except nobody bothered to actually produce and sell said additive because it was impossible to scale up the microscopic reaction to a production level usefulness.
And they tried. At least not in a way that was anything close to being cost effective
It's the same as these "no internal combustion vehicles by 2000" laws I saw passed or agitated for all my childhood in the 80's and 90's. They didn't work because there was no mass-production version of an electric vehicle.
The lawmakers were always ooh'd and ahh'd by some college's demonstrator of an electric mail truck or somesuch and immediately mandated it because, obviously, the technology exists! And think of how great it would be to not have pollution! But never considered who would build it, maintain it, charge it, etc.
At the time, no mass-volume producer of cars had an electric model. The rule eventually had to be dropped because if it were followed to the letter, city services like trash pickup and road maintenance would grind to a halt since it would be illegal to send out the diesel and gas powered trucks that did that work.
There weren't (and still aren't) charging stations big enough to handle the demand if, say, the entire state goes electric overnight by legislative decree... nor trained mechanics to service the fleet.
The newest round of them "Gas free by 202X" won't work either. Just because Tesla makes electric cars doesn't mean jack. We still don't have the infrastructure to handle everyone needing a charge, gas stations can be charitable and add a few charging stations, but, no development tract or apartment built considers it when laying their driveways and parking lots. Demanding it in local ordinance only means you get one house or one space equipped to satisfy the regs and the rest are built conventionally. 99 times out of 100, if you rent and have an electric car, you are SOL and that's nobody's fault by yours. Also, electric semi trucks are not a thing, nobody builds them, and it's not looking like anyone can or will, certainly not within the deadline. (The only person to come out and say they actually COULD was a fraud) And Teslas are not cheap, they're effectively rolling political virtue signalmobiles for those with money to show off... they are not the everyman car like a Model T, which is why people keep buying conventional Honda Accords and the like.... it's all they can afford to handle their mobility needs.
So I don't panic over Califorinia claiming they're gonna outlaw the internal combustion motor in 5 years..... they'll have to roll it back or they'll go hungry. Society can be derailed by bad legislation, but never rebuilt in a new image by it.
You can't change society at the stroke of midnight by the stroke of your pens.
Thank God
EU should ban McDonald's for being a health hazard. They could have completely banned cigarettes. Going after tattooists is just being bureaucratic for the sake of being bureaucratic. Why actually go after larger targets when you can go after the smaller guy.
This is like the old joke "The NCAA was so pissed off at Michigan that they gave a one-year suspension to Appalachian State" - they want to stamp out smoking and eating bad food due to their inherent savior complex, but those industries have too much clout, generate too much tax revenue and have too much lobby power to fight being regulated, so it all rolls downhill until it finds the first popular thing that can't fight back.
This is somehow considered fair.
