New cars sold in EU must be zero-emission from 2035
Countries in the European Union have approved a landmark law that will ensure all new cars sold from 2035 must have zero emissions.
Poland voted against the law, while Italy, Bulgaria and Romania abstained.
The agreement was delayed for weeks after Germany called for an exemption for cars running on e-fuels.
E-fuels are argued to be carbon neutral because they use captured CO2 emissions to balance out the CO2 released when the fuel is combusted in an engine.
The new law had been expected to make it impossible to sell internal combustion engine cars in the EU from 2035.
However, the exemption won by Germany will now help those with traditional vehicles - even though e-fuels are not yet produced at scale.
The EU will say how sales of e-fuel-only cars can continue later this year.
Passenger cars and vans are responsible for about 12% and 2.5% respectively of total EU emissions of CO2, the main greenhouse gas, according to the European Commission.
Earlier this month the UN warned that the world was likely to miss a target for limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5C.
Five things we've learned from UN climate report
The new EU law will require all new cars sold to have zero CO2 emissions from 2035, and 55% lower CO2 emissions from 2030, compared to 2021 levels.
Germany's late opposition came after EU countries and politicians had already agreed the 2035 phaseout and caused anger among some EU diplomats.
"As a matter of principle, we don't like this approach. We think it is not fair," Spanish energy minister Teresa Ribera said, adding that current assessments suggested e-fuels were too expensive to become widely used.
Porsche and Ferrari are among the supporters of e-fuels, which they see as a way to avoid their vehicles being weighed down by heavy batteries.
But other carmakers including Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and Ford will use electric vehicles to decarbonise.
German transport minister Volker Wissing said Tuesday's agreement would "open up important options for the population towards climate-neutral and affordable mobility".
EU climate policy chief Frans Timmermans added: "The direction of travel is clear: in 2035, new cars and vans must have zero emissions," Read original full article
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Atlantis Viewpoint
This sounds like good news to begin with, however when you read the details it is not quite as much of a deadline as it seems.
To begin with this is 12 years away and only regarding new cars sold in the EU, there is no rule on the current 292 million cars on the road in the EU or the estimated 1.4 billion in the world (as of 2021). We can only hope that over the next 14 years the number of petrol and diesel cars does not go up too much! However according to a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) the number of passenger cars (this does not include commercial vans or trucks) will increase to an estimated 1.8 billion. What percentage of these vehicles will be electric or hydrogen powered will depend on a lot of factors.
The same report by the IEA also notes that the number of electric vehicles on the road is projected to reach 145 million by 2030, up from around 11 million in 2020. To achieve this there will have to be a massive jump in electric car sales in the next 7 years, then even still this will be a very small percentage of the petrol and diesel vehicles on the road in 2030, fossil fuel powered vehicles that will be emitting massive amounts of Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) and harmful PM2.5 particulate matter air pollution.
Going back to the EU law, set for the far away date of 2035, Germany also pushed for so called e-fuel cars to be included in these 'zero-emission' cars. E-fuels are petrol powered cars but the petrol used has had the C02 captured in advance, this however does not stop emissions from the car exhaust including nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, benzene, and formaldehyde and PM2.5 particulate matter. So phasing out petrol fumes from cars is not just about CO2, the health benefits for everyone go a lot further. However this new law still allows for petrol power cars to be sold.
Poland, Italy, Bulgaria and Romania also did not back the law and of course we were only talking about EU countries in this new law, a great many countries around the world do not have any plans in place to cease the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles. So we will find out in the next decade exactly how fixed this deadline is and exactly what percentage of car sales around the world it affects. We ask for action now and we keep getting half-hearted deadlines, pushed decades in to the future to be another governments problem.
The few facts we can be certain about is that if we want to get anywhere near any of these targets; Reducing air pollution and averting climate disasters. We need to start producing a huge amount of electric and hydrogen powered vehicles, increase our true clean electricity and hydrogen production to power all of these vehicles and provide the required power grid distribution infrastructure so clean vehicles are an option to everyone, everywhere. Help us make this happen.
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