The Board of sustainable transport group Transport & Environment (T&E) has today announced William Todts as its new Executive Director. He succeeds Jos Dings, who this week leaves the position after 13 years.
Transport & Environment (T&E) welcomes European Commission’s proposal today on smart road tolls and its commitment to zero-emission mobility. The Commission also reaffirmed its commitment to set stricter CO2 standards for cars, vans and, for the first time, trucks. These are moves in the right direction, but the real test of the EU’s intentions will be the ambition of the CO2 standards and whether it proposes a zero-emission vehicle mandate, the sustainable transport group said.
Belgium this week introduces a distanced-based truck toll as a new study reveals that trucks cost society €143 billion a year across the EU. The independent study for green transport group Transport & Environment (T&E) also found that trucks currently cover only 30% of these costs through taxation and charges. As the EU revises its road charging directive, T&E said Belgium’s road charging scheme is a fair way to ensure that trucks pay for a bigger share of the damage they cause.
T&E commissioned a study to monetise the external costs of trucks and to determine whether truck users are now covering a larger share of their external costs than in 2009 – when the first Are Trucks Taking Their Toll? report was published. The report finds that while there has been progress, a lot remains to be done.
Over what distances is it realistic to expect people to commute by bicycle? And what if that bicycle offers electrically assisted pedalling? These are the questions being researched by Bram Rotthier, an academic at a university in the Belgian city of Leuven. Rotthier has commissioned 15 cyclists to test commuting distances, one of whom is a Green politician who is cycling around 100km per day on a ‘speed pedelec’, an electric bicycle capable of up to 45 km/h.
This is the T&E’s response to the European Commission’s public consultation on the handbook on Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA).
New research from the OECD suggests stricter environmental policies do not hold back economic growth, and that governments and companies are often wrong to claim that measures to tackle environmental threats will damage economic competitiveness through imposing a burden of ‘green tape’.
The right of individuals and NGOs to challenge environmental decisions has been thrown into doubt by a controversial ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ).
A coalition of 140 groups representing 250,000 citizens from 10 European countries has called on the EU to strip the aviation sector of the tax exemptions and state aid it currently enjoys, as well as ban flights operating at night.
