The European Commission have announced in the last week that by the year 2020, the average emissions from all new cars that are built in the European Union should have no more than 95 grams of carbon dioxide for every kilometre that is driven and that all vans will have to be on average 130 CO2 for every kilometre.
By the year 2015 the current proposal is for 190g and by 2024, 155g. These will represent cuts of 14 per cent and 30 per cent on the levels of 2008.
In comparison to this, proposed emissions for Australia by the year 2024 is much weaker, even more so than that of the United States. Their standard will require that all vehicles achieve an average of 102g CO2/km by the year 2025.
In 2008 the government published a paper to discuss the intention to move to a regulated emissions standard. Since then not much has happened; after three years in 2011 there was another paper to discuss if a starting point of 190g CO2/km will be adopted.
Australia has 0.32 per cent of the world’s population but yet it produces 1.43 per cent of CO2 emissions. So this means that pollution levels are 4.5 times the global average per person. This is just below the Unites States. Emissions here have also been growing a lot faster than other countries. We are using at least 25 to 30 per cent more fuel for every unit of energy produced than Europe, The United States and Japan.
According to a study that was published in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in many parts of the world we are not progressing and we are not seeing any evidence of progress in managing the emissions in developing or developed countries.
One of the reasons why Australia’s new vehicle emissions are higher than Europe’s is that there has been fewer measures put in place to reduce pollution levels. In Europe there are higher petrol taxes as well as vehicle excise duties plus there are incentives for consumers to purchase low CO2 emitting vehicles.
Vehicles built in Australia emit well above the average but there has been some improvements from three manufacturers. Of these three Ford has the highest emissions with 253g/km, following them is Holden with 229g/km and Toyota has the lowest average with 203g/km.
This will be good news for car rental companies in Sydney and other major cities, as they mainly use vehicles from these manufacturers. As they continue to improve the emissions from these vehicles the car rental companies will have a much greener and environmentally friendly fleet.
Rental companies in the local area have been moving to fleets with small more fuel friendly vehicles as trend towards environmentally awareness and more fuel conscious lifestlyes continue to grow exponentially.
When you use car rental in sydney you can be sure that you will be will driving vehicles which produce less pollution and are kinder to the environment and will become progressively more so as manufactures improve their vehicles.