EU poised to water down new car pollution rules after industry lobbying
EU poised to water down new car pollution rules after industry lobbying
Exclusive: Nitrogen dioxide limits and approval tests practically unchanged from current rules under Euro 7 proposals
I think it's less about industry lobbying and more an unwillingness for these governments to actually do what needs to be done to reduce the roadblocks needed for an outright ban on new ICE vehicles.
There doesn't seem to be much of push to get infrastructure like charging stations in place and it seems they thought it was a 'reverse Field of Dreams' where "if you come, they will build it." Charging stations and grid upgrades aren't going to appear out of the ether simply because some politicians want to ban ICE vehicles. I don't know the situation in the EU, but here in the US, most of our charging stations are built by Tesla or VW (under the Electrify America name as a punishment for dieselgate). Tesla charging stations aren't abundant everywhere and VW seems more than happy to let their charging stations become dilapidated and antiquated as they're not building them willingly to begin with. There are many parts of the country where your only option to charge is a 120/240V outlet, which output as little as 3-4 miles per hour of charge. This isn't the way forward and it'll likely take government incentives to make it happen.
Where I live (NL, EU) there are several charging stations (+20 spots) within a 10 mile radius. Every neighborhood has like 5-10 parking spots with a charger. Around 10-15% of the residential housing have their own high-power charging outlet. Office buildings have around the same percentage (10-15%) of their parking lot converted to charging parking spots. Even parking lots in cities come with that same percentage of charging stations these days.
Next to that around 30% of all housing is equipped with solar panels. New office buildings and factories all have giant solar arrays on their roofs. No exceptions.
In the EU the biggest problem is not willingness or effort. The biggest problem is reality. You can't connect that all to a power grid designed in the 60s. Energy infrastructure is hard, big and slow to build. Our grid is full. We are building like mad men but it just isn't realisable in a short time. Especially since all of the EU is building a new grid at the same time.. Building (nuclear) power plants, wind mills, conversion stations, high power grid cables all takes a lot of time.
But, mobility in the EU is starting to become too expensive for the median income. Here a litre of ron95 gasoline is around 2 euros. The purchase of new cars are taxed to insanity here in NL. Around 50% of the price is tax. A new electric vehicle with acceptable range is somewhere around 50-60k (ionic, ev5/6)
Electric vehicles had all sorts of tax exemptions. That's changing. Soon they're also taxes to the fullest.
Alas, everyone who doesn't have a job which provides a car does what I do: drive that old piece of garbage till it really falls apart.
And I think that are the 2 main reasons for the laxer rules on ice vehicles. Reality regarding the needed infrastructure and cost to the public. Everything has become so much more expensive the last 4 years.
I my experience - having lived there and elsewhere in Europe - The Netherlands is invariably at the upper end of these things, even if the Dutch complain it's still not good enough (I would even say the country's "well above average" condition is probably because of that).
You should see the status of things in my native, car obcessed country of Portugal: all talkie-talkie yet a complete total disgrace for the rest. As for Renewables, the regulatory and legal framework has been designed to reward a few politically well connected companies (corruption over here is widespread, mainly at the higher levels and paid with the usual non-executive board memberships for "friendly" politicians and such), so personal solar generation is incredibly rare in this, one of the sunniest countries in Europe, because if you feed excess power to the grid you get at best 1/4 of what you pay for consuming it from the grid, and almost all of Renewables are big installations that no individual could ever have and hence are owned mainly by said politically well connected companies: hydrodams and large wind generators.
It doesn't help that most people's Ecological awareness is such a complete total joke that even for those who believe themselves as ecologically-minded ends at the point were they're faced with, say, walking to take their kids to a school less than 1km away instead of going by car.
For all its problems (no country is perfect), The Netherlands if comparativelly a frigging paradise in this and a number of other domains.
On the other hand you have good public transit
The Netherlands is very bad at public transport though. Some villages only have 1 bus per hour and only during rush hour, nothing during the rest of the day. This way we'll never get away from cars.
There doesn’t seem to be much of push to get infrastructure like charging stations in place
Is this code for taxpayer handouts to private businesses so they can maximize profit off of customers?
This isn’t the way forward and it’ll likely take government incentives to make it happen.
There it is!
Infrastructure needs central backing, that's not exactly controversial. Would you rather each individual company has to fund its own chargers and end up with a patchwork that only works for each brand individually (and probably change over time to not support older models). Thats how the railways initially developed in 19th century Britain and it was a horrible mess of privately owned incompatible gauges.
Can you name a single industry that wasn't created off the back of government investment? This isn't about handing money to private companies, it's about getting the shit we need to comply with the laws that are being set. I'd fully support private industry funding the entire thing but what evidence is there that they'd actually do it? They haven't over the last decade outside of Tesla, so what's going to change that now?
Remember how many senior managers from automakers went to jail for the rigging of diesel car emissions during regulatory tests and which is estimated to have caused and still cause tens of thousands of additionl deaths in Europe due to the additional polution?
That would be that magical number that when multiplied by any other number yields itself as result: zero.
If per the actual actions of these politicians (not their words, talk is cheap and their words are often unrelated to their actions) even the lifes of europeans are less important than the continued prosperity of those "oh so important" top managers in the auto industry, you can hardly expect they would treat Climate as anywhere as important as the profitability of the auto industry.
Nothing to see here, just the EU doing what its constituency told them to do.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The EU is poised to water down a landmark piece of car pollution legislation after extensive lobbying from the automotive industry, which experts say will cause an estimated €100bn in health and environmental costs.
Clove experts recommended significantly reducing the amount of nitrogen dioxide that vehicles are allowed to emit, and tightening real driving conditions in the approval tests for new models.
However, under an agreement made by the EU’s 27 member states in September, limits for nitrogen dioxide (and other harmful pollutants such as ultrafine particles), as well as approval tests, would be practically unchanged from those in the previous legislation, Euro 6.
In a secret meeting on 1 June 2022 between a representative of the European commissioner for the single market, Thierry Breton, and the then chair of Acea, Oliver Zipse, who is also the CEO of BMW, carmakers argued against strict nitrogen dioxide emissions limits and in favour of keeping weak approval tests.
Several sources indicated that lower exhaust emissions limits were traded off by the commission as part of an unspoken deal to secure industry support for the EU-wide phase-out of combustion engines in 2035.
Experts say current laboratory measurements fail to capture real driving conditions, for example in older cars, in cold temperatures, or for trips shorter than 16km (10 miles), which typically take place in urban areas.
The original article contains 951 words, the summary contains 223 words. Saved 77%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I feel that, at some point, the emissions standards get so restrictive, that it makes them impossible to practically meet. Making it a ban in all but name. I'm not familiar enough, with the original proposal for Euro7. But it seems like it might be at that threshold. The European Union needs to make up their mind, whether or not they want to allow combustion vehicles at all...
They did. Starting 2035, ICEs won't be sold anymore in EU.
Honestly; instead of trying to tighten emissions restrictions (perhaps beyond feasible levels?), the EU should have just moved this date closer...
Edit: I just realized: I wonder how the ban affects all the talk about synthetic and bio-fuels? Those are still based on internal combustion. Then again; although ideally CO2-neutral, they still emit NOx and particulate.
That's effectively been rescinded. It will likely be formally rescinded at some point.