The Council of ICAO – the UN’s aviation body – is meeting to take decisions on critical aspects governing the global offsetting scheme for aviation, known as CORSIA. Decisions taken will largely determine whether the CORSIA will have environmental integrity in meeting its goal of carbon-neutral growth from 2020, or whether a system might be created that operates in secrecy and allows bad quality, double-counted emissions credits which make climate change worse.
The report shows that the CO2 emissions gap between the independently performed WLTP and NEDC tests is small, and suggests the new WLTP test procedure is likely not sufficient to reduce or close the gap between official and real-world CO2 emissions. The report also stresses the lack of transparency about vehicle data, which complicates the analysis of independent tests and makes possible cheating harder to detect.
Latest electric passenger car sales data from 2018 shows that the US has overtaken Europe in the numbers of electric vehicles (EV1) sold, by around 60,000 units. This is despite the EU being much more committed to climate action than the US where the Trump administration is dismantling.
In the context of the EU recast of the Renewable Energy Directive (REDII), the European co-legislators asked the Commission to develop a methodology to identify high ILUC risk biofuels with a significant expansion into high-carbon stock areas. These high ILUC risk biofuels would be frozen and then fully phased-out of the EU renewable targets by the year 2030. Some parties have raised questions regarding the compatibility of these measures with international trade rules.
On Monday 18 March 2019, the European Commission will present and discuss with Member States, industry and civil society a “Roadmap towards clean vehicles”. This document is the first-ever EU strategy to tackle polluting diesels on the road. It is the first proposal for an integrated EU strategy to tackle the legacy of Dieselgate currently on Europe’s roads. The document has been shared with governments beforehand. T&E’s has obtained a copy of the final draft and puts in context, analyses and comments the roadmap in this briefing.