David Jolly: Sheer numbers could scuttle clean car push

If we want affordable, practical and fully green technology," Eric Feunteun said in an interview in an office building on the edge of Paris, "the electric vehicle is the answer at this stage."

Feunteun is hardly an unbiased source. He heads the electric car programme at the French automaker Renault, which sells more electric vehicles in Europe than any other company - and with its Japanese alliance partner, Nissan, accounts for half the all-electric vehicles now on the world's roads.

The number of automobiles on the world's roads is on pace to double - to more than two billion - by 2030. And more likely than not, most of those cars will be burning carbon-emitting petrol or diesel fuels.

That is because much of the expansion will be propelled by the rise of the consumer class in industrialising parts of the globe, especially in China and India, as hundreds of millions of new drivers discover the glory of the open road. Those populous and geographically sprawling countries might be hard pressed any time soon to assemble the ubiquitous electricity grid required for recharging electric vehicles; and much of the electricity China and India will produce in coming decades will come from coal-fired power plants that are some of the planet's biggest emitters of carbon dioxide.

Given the limitations of electric cars so far - including their limited range between charges - many experts predict that most of the billion additional cars predicted to be on the road in 2030 will have internal combustion engines that spew greenhouse gases.

The UN conference will not deal directly with cars or with what countries should do about them or other major sources of carbon emissions, like factories and power plants. Rather, the conference is meant to get countries to commit to reducing their carbon footprints, leaving the details about how to achieve their goals to each individual nation. But virtually everyone who studies the issue understands that transportation, which is still 95 per cent reliant on petroleum, is the world's fastest-growing energy-based contributor to greenhouse gases. About three-quarters of the total comes from motor vehicles.

Few disagree that the best solutions include the adoption of electric vehicles and, especially in cities, making it easier for people to forgo cars by using public transportation or riding bicycles. Optimists argue that even in the case of cars with internal-combustion engines, carbon dioxide emissions can be cut significantly by measures like increasing fuel economy and introducing smart-driving technologies.

Lewis M Fulton, a researcher at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, cites "carbon intensity" - the amount of carbon dioxide produced for each mile travelled - as an area where advances can be made. By 2030, he said, it should be possible to cut the carbon intensity of new cars powered by fossil fuel by 50 per cent from 2005 levels. Already, he said, there has been about a 20 per cent improvement. "I believe that this is doable," Fulton said. "I think we're going to be serious enough about climate change that we're going to see the policy changes we need to make this happen."

The countries with the most cars today have set aggressive goals for improving fuel mileage. The United States, under President Barack Obama's fleet-wide standards for carmakers, is aiming for an average of 54.5 miles per gallon (mpg) by 2025, up from about 30 mpg now. China is aiming for 50.1 mpg, and the European Union 60.6.

Still, the math is daunting. If the number of cars doubles, and the average mileage improves by only 50 per cent, all of the fuel-economy gains would be offset by the emissions from the new vehicles. And that assumes the auto industry does its part to comply with the new standards and that national regulators diligently enforce them. Recent revelations that Volkswagen, for one, deliberately misled regulators, and that European Union air-quality standards and enforcement have been far from rigorous, do not inspire confidence.

Reducing tailpipe carbon dioxide emissions "is absolutely possible," said Daniel F Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, an environmental group based in Washington. "But the automakers are attacking these standards as we speak, both in Congress and through a review of the programme they demanded from the Obama administration," Becker said. "Similar attacks are underway in the EU."

Congress, in an effort to make the US more energy independent, passed a law in 2007 mandating a 35 mpg auto-fleet standard by 2020. Before that, there had been no official change to American fuel-economy standards in more than 30 years.

"The US auto industry was successful between 1975 and 2007 in preventing any improvement for mileage standards for CO2 emissions," Becker said. "They exploit every loophole in the standards, making more SUVs, pick-ups and other light duty trucks than cars because trucks have weaker standards than cars, and more large vehicles because large vehicles have weaker standards than smaller vehicles."
© 2015 The New York Times News Service