(Frankfurt) It would be necessary to sell half as many combustion engine cars as expected to achieve the objective of limiting global warming to 1.5 ° C, according to a Greenpeace study published Thursday.
Posted at 10:25 p.m.
“Given the inconsistency between manufacturers’ forecasts and the needs to comply with the Paris agreement, manufacturers must accelerate the movement to increase sales of electric vehicles”, warns the NGO in its report.
To meet the goal of keeping Earth warming to 1.5°C above the pre-industrial era, as defined in the Paris Agreement, the planet cannot support more than 315 million motor vehicles additional heat, according to this report.
However, automakers plan to sell about 712 million more, according to this study.
To reach these figures, experts from the University of Technology in Sydney (Australia) and the Center of Automative Management (Bergisch Gladbach, Germany) modeled the maximum number of gasoline and diesel vehicles tolerable if the objective of lowering the carbon emissions according to the Paris agreement had to be respected.
To do this, they made projections based on sales forecasts for thermal vehicles from 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 compatible with the 1.5°C target, according to the report. The last to have announced its transition to electric vehicles, Toyota, obtains the “worst” performance among the four manufacturers studied, because it plans to sell between 55 and 71 million vehicles too many, specifies Greenpeace.
The European Union did conclude an agreement at the end of October to ban the sale of thermal cars in the EU from 2035, but in the rest of the world, few countries have made such commitments and car manufacturers are still many markets to sell internal combustion cars for a long time to come.
Environmental advocates question the responsibility of companies regarding their carbon footprint, by not only taking into account their energy needs during production, but also withholding the emissions of their products once on the market.
According to this calculation, manufacturers of thermal vehicles remain among the biggest polluters on the planet, with the transport sector in general accounting for around a quarter of all current greenhouse gas emissions, half of these emissions coming from cars.
The latest international climate commitments to date are “very far” from meeting the objective of the Paris agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 ° C, had for its part alerted the UN agency for climate change. climate a few days before the start of COP27, which opened this week in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.