Something big went down in Europe today: MEPs voted on how efficient our future cars should be. This lays the foundations for rules that carmakers have to abide by.
Almost 65,000 of us signed an urgent petition in the last few weeks to help us cut our oil use, halve our new car CO2 emissions and even create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
And yesterday we handed our demands to key MEPs ahead of the vote - in the form of a comic book that showed them they could be heroes if they voted for strong regulations.
But today leading MEPs chose strong fuel efficiency targets for the long term, and loopholes called ‘supercredits’ that would weaken targets for the short term. These would let electric cars count more towards the average emissions of a car fleet than SUVs. This would mean more CO2, higher driving costs and more need for expensive oil imports.
Car companies have been lobbying politicians to introduce loopholes by claiming that they can’t produce the fuel efficient technology in time. But we know they already have this technology - after 2 years of pressure from Greenpeace supporters, Volkswagen agreed it would meet the strong targets we asked for.
We couldn’t have got this far without you. Now we have to tell national governments that the regulations must be stronger. Yesterday key MEP Rebecca Harms told us “We as politicians need the work of NGOs like Greenpeace to bring things forward! While working on political compromises we still need a reminder what is right and what is necessary to reach our environmental goals.”
We published a report and infographic, above, today to show them that supercredits can’t be taken lightly.
So let’s act now! Tell national governments to fight back against supercredits – sign the petition to cut car pollution.
