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Reduce emissions fairly
Page 18
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Brian Weatherley reflects on global warming and how it's put truck manufacturers between a rock and a hard place when it comes to selling vehicles into developing markets.
I've been feeling rather guilty lately. I've been contemplating my own contribution to Global Warming as a journalist on CM Somewhat nervously, I've concluded that at best it's pretty neutral — although I do score better if I'm castigating the Department for Transport and the Treasury for their appalling collective lack of imagination in encouraging hauliers to adopt cleaner trucks. Only, for all the good that does, I do wonder if I mightn't do better eating an old fridge.
Increasingly, the real challenge of emissions reduction is less about what European truck operators do to limit greenhouse gases and more to do with what their counterparts in developing countries are getting up to.
According to the German Economics Institute DIW, world energy-related CO2 emissions recorded their biggest increase since 2000, with China the main contributor following an emissions growth of 15% year-on-year. Meanwhile, the industrialised countries saw a more modest increase in emissions in 2004, up 1.3% in the OECD zone.
While we should all be concerned about the fact that road freight in Europe is continually growing, at least we're doing something about its impact. In countries such as India and China road transport is exploding and there's nothing we can do to stop it. Naturally, this puts truck manufacturers in something of a quandary— how to grab a piece of the action in the developing countries, but without doing it off the back of "old-style" technology on new and used vehicles?
Thus the world's truck makers have to persuade third-world buyers to adopt state-of-the art low emission engines now, or all the work that's been done in reducing exhaust emissions in Western Europe and the US will be wiped out by the increasing numbers of "previous generation" trucks being sot into new world markets like India and China.
And that is easier said than done. However, we simply don't have the time for those countries to go through the same learning curve we've gone through in the West. That's how serious global warming is.