5 November 2015, Carbon Brief, Q&A: What does the VW scandal mean for CO2 emissions? The Volkswagen (VW) emissions scandal spilled over into climate policy on Tuesday, after the company admitted to “irregularities” in its CO2 testing results. The firm’s share price — already down 60% after revelations it had deliberately cheated air pollution tests — fell a further 9% by Wednesday morning. However, the irregularities also have implications for CO2 emissions, as well as UK and EU climate targets. Carbon Brief investigates. What are CO2 test “irregularities”? On Tuesday, VW issued a “clarification” about the CO2 emissions testing of up to 800,000 of its vehicles in Europe. The statement says: “During the course of internal investigations irregularities were found when determining type approval CO2 levels…It was established that the CO2 levels and thus the fuel consumption figures for some models were set too low during the CO2 certification process.” Though the precise nature of these problems remains unclear, it has attracted wide media coverage. The Times notes petrol cars have become embroiled in the scandal for the first time. The BBC says the “dirty laundry” is piling up for VW. The Guardian says VW might have manipulated CO2 tests, in addition to its now-notorious “defeat device” for NOx air pollution. The New York Times says VW’s pollution problems have taken a “costly new turn”. A Guardian live-blog says costs for VW could exceed the €2bn it has set aside. Current EU regulations limit car CO2 emissions to no more than 130 grammes of CO2 per kilometre, notes Politico. This is set to fall to a fleet-wide average of 95gCO2/km in 2020. In the UK, vehicle excise duty is linked to CO2 emissions meaning some cars may have had unduly low rates, says Autocar. The Telegraph says some drivers could face higher taxes. However, this year’s budget changed the rules to decouple car tax and CO2 emissions from 2017. Read More here
Category Archives: PLEA Network
4 November 2015, The Daly News, Time to Stop Worshipping Economic Growth. There are physical limits to growth on a finite planet. In 1972, the Club of Rome issued their groundbreaking report—Limits to Growth (twelve million copies in thirty-seven languages). The authors predicted that by about 2030, our planet would feel a serious squeeze on natural resources, and they were right on target. In 2009, the Stockholm Resilience Center introduced the concept of planetary boundaries to help the public envision the nature of the challenges posed by limits to growth and physical/biological boundaries. They defined nine boundaries critical to human existence that, if crossed, could generate abrupt or irreversible environmental changes. The global economy must be viewed from a macro-perspective to realize that infringement of the planetary boundaries puts many life support ecosystems in jeopardy. Without functional ecosystems, the very survival of life forms, as well as human institutions, is put in doubt, including any economy. There is no economy on a dead planet!. These boundaries apply to te economy because the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the ecosystems that make life on earth possible. (Some understanding of ecology should be a prerequisite for an advanced degree in economics!) Scientists are concerned that we have already overstepped the boundaries on biogeochemical flows(nitrogen) and biosphere integrity (genetic biodiversity). Read More here
4 November 2015, New York Times, The Tough Realities of the Paris Climate Talks. In less than a month, delegates from more than 190 countries will convene in Paris to finalize a sweeping agreement intended to constrain human influence on the climate. But any post-meeting celebration will be tempered by two sobering scientific realities that will weaken the effectiveness of even the most ambitious emissions reduction plans that are being discussed. The first reality is that emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas of greatest concern, accumulate in the atmosphere and remain there for centuries as they are slowly absorbed by plants and the oceans. This means modest reductions in emissions will only delay the rise in atmospheric concentration but will not prevent it. Thus, even if global emissions could be reduced by a heroic average 20 percent from their “business as usual” course over the next 50 years, we would be delaying the projected doubling of the concentration by only 10 years, from 2065 to 2075. This is why drastic reductions would be needed to stabilize human influences on the climate at supposed “safe” levels. According to scenarios used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global annual per capita emissions would need to fall from today’s five metric tons to less than one ton by 2075, a level well below what any major country emits today and comparable to the emissions from such countries as Haiti, Yemen and Malawi. For comparison, current annual per capita emissions from the United States, Europe and China are, respectively, about 17, 7 and 6 tons. The second scientific reality, arising from peculiarities of the carbon dioxide molecule, is that the warming influence of the gas in the atmosphere changes less than proportionately as the concentration changes. As a result, small reductions will have progressively less influence on the climate as the atmospheric concentration increases. The practical implication of this slow logarithmic dependence is that eliminating a ton of emissions in the middle of the 21st century will exert only half of the cooling influence that it would have had in the middle of the 20th century. Read More here
3 November 2015, Bloomberg View, What Economists Don’t Get About Climate Change. Economists tend to see climate change as a big optimization problem: Weigh the potential costs of future disasters against the benefits of fossil-fueled economic growth, and find a price of carbon that will balance the two. Unfortunately, it’s an illusory goal. The Cost of Carbon Consider, for example, a recent study by Yale University’s Kenneth Gillingham and colleagues. Using a collection of so-called “integrated” models of climate and the economy, they seek to get a better handle on how various uncertainties — in weather, population growth and technological development — might affect the price that policy makers should put on carbon. Their conclusion: No matter what happens, the optimal price in 2020 would probably be no more than about $50 per ton. The paper’s appearance may be timed to influence policy makers at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, which begins at the end of this month. It really shouldn’t, because it feigns certainty in areas where none is to be had. Granted, such integrated models include some realistic climate physics and economics. Yet their builders inevitably face crucial questions about which we know very little. For example, just how sensitive are global temperatures to the addition of further carbon dioxide? And how much economic damage can we expect from a temperature rise of, say, 2 degrees or 5 degrees? Read More here