Half as many combustion-powered cars would have to be sold as planned to meet the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, according to a Greenpeace study released Thursday.
“Given the inconsistency between automakers’ forecasts and what is needed to meet the Paris Agreement, automakers must accelerate the push to increase electric vehicle sales,” the NGO warns in its report.
To meet the goal of containing global warming to 1.5°C above the pre-industrial era, as defined in the Paris agreement, the planet cannot support more than 315 million additional combustion-powered vehicles, according to this report.
Yet automakers still expect to sell about 712 million of them, according to the study.
To reach these numbers, experts from the University of Technology Sydney (Australia) and the Center of Automative Management (Bergisch Gladbach, Germany) modeled the maximum number of gasoline and diesel vehicles that would be tolerable if the goal of lowering carbon emissions according to the Paris Agreement were to be met.
To do this, they made projections based on the sales forecasts for internal combustion vehicles of four of the main international car manufacturers: the Japanese world leader Toyota, the German Volkswagen Group, the South Korean Hyundai/Kia and the American General Motors.
None of the four industry giants’ sales forecasts are consistent with the 1.5°C goal, according to the report. The latest to announce its transition to electric vehicles, Toyota, gets the “worst” performance among the four manufacturers surveyed, as it expects to sell between 55 and 71 million too many vehicles, Greenpeace says.
The European Union did reach an agreement at the end of October to ban the sale of internal combustion cars in the EU from 2035, but in the rest of the world, few countries have made such commitments and the car industry will retain many markets for internal combustion cars for a long time to come.
Environmental advocates are questioning the responsibility of companies for their carbon footprint, not only taking into account their energy needs during production, but also the emissions of their products once on the market.
According to this calculation, manufacturers of internal combustion vehicles remain among the biggest polluters on the planet, with the transport sector in general accounting for about a quarter of all current greenhouse gas emissions, half of which come from cars.
The latest international climate commitments are “very far” from meeting the objective of the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 ° C, had warned the UN climate agency a few days before the start of COP27, which opened this week in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
