EU Fleet consumption regulation undermines climate protection (White Paper)
The decision of EU-Commission, EU-Parliament and Member States on the 17th December 2018 to further cut the fleet average CO2 emissions from new cars by 37.5 percent beyond 2021 level is presented as a big success for the climate. But due to the generous credit and super-credit system for electric and plug-in hybrid electric cars and the spurious measurement method, this system allows car manufacturers to produce heavy plug-in hybrid electric cars with high fuel consumption under normal use to be counted as zero-emission cars in the fleet calculations. This fault in the EU fleet consumption control mechanism has far-reaching consequences for the climate and the German tax payers. Without further regulations in the energy and transport sector, the real emissions will only decrease very slowly.
In this paper, we show that the fleet consumption regulation is far from reaching the necessary emission reduction in the transport sector. Instead of the 54% expected reduction in the average specific CO2 emission of the new German car fleet by 2030 as compared to the existing level, the real emissions will only decrease by about 10%. Furthermore, the regulation will allow car manufacturers to continue selling heavy cars that are deteriorating to the environment.
In addition to unnecessary environmental pollution, this will lead to high financial costs for German taxpayers, as the state will have to compensate for the deficit in the transport sector by purchasing CO2 certificates from other EU countries as of 2021. For the 5 million plug-in hybrid cars determined, which have to be sold on the German market by 2030 in order to achieve the EU fleet consumption target of 59gCO2 km, we estimated an expenditure of 4.9 to 9.8 billion euros, depending on the price development of the CO2 certificates, which the state must offset by purchasing additional certificates over the lifetime of the vehicles.
In the end of the paper, we recommend to revise the fleet consumption regulation and briefly describe some additional measures/instruments, which combined with a revised fleet consumption regulation could achieve the climate protection goals in the transport sector.