E.U. Should Delay, Dilute Swingeing CO2 Rules

In a sane world, European governments would be scrambling to rescind tight regulation and extortionate taxation introduced in the name of saving the planet from the ravages of global warming, induced by CO2 emissions from cars.

After all, the science justifying action to raise the cost of energy generally and forcing the European automotive industry to raise its fuel economy to unattainably high levels, has been shown to be in doubt, if not downright fraudulent.

At the very least, you would expect some acknowledgment of the fact that all these swingeing taxes which will ratchet down on the European car manufacturers over the next 10 years might not be justified. But it seems that our leaders in Europe and not to mention the U.S. are turning a blind eye to mounting evidence that humans are not in fact warming the climate.

This matters a lot because the threat of climate change has been the excuse for governments to introduce taxation and regulation raising the cost of electricity and energy in general, and threatening to imperil the automotive industry in particular.

Experts are divided over what action should be taken. Some say the E.U rules should be watered down, and the most stringent delayed for up to five years. Others say being forced to comply with tight fuel efficiency rules will be a long term plus for European manufacturers because the global car market will be increasingly biased towards small, fuel-sipping cars. This also threatens to isolate American manufacturers, which face less stringent targets.

Eye-watering
In Europe, car manufacturers, starting in 2012, must raise the average fuel economy of their fleets in stages to about 43 miles per U.S. gallon by 2015. By 2020, this must be raised close to an eye-watering 60 miles per U.S. gallon equivalent. The 2015 rules will be hugely expensive, adding between 500 and 1,000 euros ($675 to $1,350) to the cost of every car made in Europe, according to Deutsche Bank, and some would say massively pointless, given that Europe’s car makers already achieve close to an average 35.5 mpg, which U.S. car makers must achieve by 2016.

(European lawmakers use “grammes per kilometer” to measure the output of CO2, but the actual miles per gallon equivalent is easier to follow).

If this massive investment in fuel efficiency really was going to save mankind from disastrous global warming, nobody would argue. But evidence from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), used by governments to push policies that they say will save the world, has been tainted by claims of political interference and accusations that scientists involved in collecting the data have been exaggerating numbers which point to global warming and ignoring evidence to the contrary.

Glacier canard
News last year that Britain’s Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, a major contributor to IPCC reports, had fiddled with the numbers was followed by the Himalayan glacier canard. This purported to prove that all the glaciers in the Himalayas would melt by 2035, but was based on hearsay, not science. The same was true for reports on Amazon jungle retreat and accelerating hurricane activity; both shown not to be linked to human CO2 activity. This was in addition to the “hockey stick” controversy”, said to show a recent surge in warming after about 1,000 years of steadiness. In fact, researchers used an algorithm designed to ignore evidence of previous warming, exaggerate recent data, and produce a graph which was flat for a thousand years, but surged over the last century producing a hockey stick shape.

And just last week, Professor Phil Jones, formerly director of the Climatic Research Unit, conceded that the world might have been warmer 1,000 years ago, suggesting a lack of human impact, and said for the past 15 years there has been no “statistically significant” warming.

Science fiction writer Michael Crichton wrote a satire in 2004 called “State of Fear”, in which radical activists were so sure that action needed to be taken to stop humans killing the planet, that they induced all kinds of disasters to “prove” that they were right. Crichton was moved to write the book because, as a scientist, he had delved into the justification for human induced global warming, and found to his astonishment that the evidence was very thin indeed. As Reuters’ Science and Technology Correspondent in the 1990s I came to a similar conclusion.

Was it a satire?
It seems that “State of Fear” might not have been such a satire after all.

And European politicians are behaving as if nothing has happened.

Connie Hedegaard of Denmark, briefly chairman of the U.N. Climate conference in Copenhagen last December, took up her position this month as new European Union Climate Change Commissioner, and quickly talked about action to fix global warming and climate change as though nothing had happened to cast doubts on the conventional wisdom.  This week, press reports from Germany said the European Commission, the E.U.’s executive branch, wants to introduce a continent wide CO2 tax, to save the planet. Europeans already often pay more than three times what Americans pay for a gallon of gasoline. In Britain, gasoline taxes add about 70 per cent to the price.

According to Garel Rhys, Emeritus Professor at Cardiff University’s Business School and automotive industry expert, European politicians should postpone the 2020 requirement of close to 60 mpg, and make the earlier rules easier to meet, pending a re-examination of the science which attributes global warming to human activity.

“If what is taken as gospel in terms of global warming turns out not to be the case, then the automotive industry has been encouraged and forced to spend huge amounts of money effectively for nothing,”  Rhys said.

“At the very least, the E.U. should rejig the timetable so that 2020 standards are put back to 2025, and that would give a chance for the truth or otherwise about the climate debate to come to the fore. The 2020 standards are impossible to meet with petrol and diesel engines alone, and we are assuming a breakthrough in battery technologies,” Rhys said.

Score two out of three
Battery vehicles aren’t yet capable of getting to close to the internal combustion engine, which provides speed, acceleration and range. Battery engines can only serve up two out of three of these.

“The consumer has been left out. They will be reluctant to buy a product which is inferior,” Rhys said.

Roger Helmer, British Conservative and Member of the European Parliament, wonders why politicians have taken aim at the car industry in their quest to cut CO2, when the insulation of buildings can reap gains at least as big, at relatively little cost.

“So why does the Commission choose to hit on the auto industry rather than insulate buildings? Because beating up the auto industry is sexy and macho and gets great headlines, whereas insulating buildings is boring,” Helmer said.

Transport & Environment
Not surprisingly, environmental groups aren’t keen on cutting any slack for car makers.

Dudley Curtis, spokesman for Brussels-based Transport & Environment lobby group, doesn’t believe that the E.U rules will stop healthy manufacturers making profits, or that the case for human influence on the climate has been undermined. Apart from anything else, greater gas mileage will benefit people.

“Fuel efficiency targets mean people get cars that use less fuel, so they save money, where is the problem?” Curtis said.

Professor Peter Cooke of Britain’s Buckingham University thinks forcing Europe’s manufacturers to raise their fuel efficiency will pay long term dividends for them because the car market is becoming ever more global and new markets in Asia and South America will want small, fuel efficient cars.

David Bailey, Professor of International Business Strategy and Economics at Coventry University, agrees.

“Manufacturers want stability and a set of targets they have to achieve. We should use regulation to stimulate green technology which will be a long-term benefit. I don’t think we should change targets, but we should help them financially to get there. I’d like to see activist industrial policy that supports green technologies,” Bailey said.

Head start for Europe
“Even if that was the case (doubts about climate change science), and I don’t think things have changed that much, Europe should get a head start to give it a competitive edge. The E.U. rules are a sensible way to get ahead and give Europe a head start on the rest of the world,” Bailey said.

Cardiff University’s Rhys is not convinced, and says the car manufacturers are facing a double whammy. The recession and weak markets are making it difficult to make any money at all, while regulators dream up new ways to make production more expensive and profits more elusive.

“This new (CO2) regulation is costing literally billions of euros, but given the nature of the market place, they will not be able to recoup spending, so profits have been cut very thinly indeed. On top of this the manufacturers are having to meet social needs, which includes extra safety, noise, as well as tougher fuel efficiency requirements,“ Rhys said.

Middle Way
Perhaps there is a middle way, which both sides can accept.

Everyone knows fossil fuels will run out sooner rather than later, and that remaining supplies should be used economically and sensibly, while providing research funds to make sure that fuel cells or wind, tidal, nuclear fission or fusion technologies can be up and running in time. Surely this can be done without governments insisting our cars are ridiculously small, affordable only by the rich, and trying to shame us into submission by saying if we don’t comply, we all die.