All these SUV owners are citizens with votes, in case climate-obsessed politicians – who plan to take their existing vehicle choices away – have forgotten. Pretending to be able to change the weather is a policy stance liable to fail in the long run, and many have already rejected it.
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SUVs are conquering the world, says Forbes (via The GWPF).
That’s a problem for efforts to reign in emissions from the global transportation sector, which accounts for roughly 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
For the first time ever in the U.S. last year, sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) likely accounted for half or just over half of all vehicles sold, according to recent data from IHS Markit, a data and analytics firm.
Others are rapidly catching up.
Between 2010 and 2019, the share of SUVs in overall car sales in China jumped from 14% to 44%. In Europe the SUV share climbed from 10% to 36%.
The SUV’s popularity is effectively negating the annual fuel efficiency gains from better technology and tightening fuel economy standards.
The average fuel efficiency increases of light-duty vehicles per year has slowed to only around 1.3% in recent years — down from the roughly 2% per year in the handful of years prior, and well below the roughly 3% needed merely to keep total global emissions from cars from rising.
“Consumer demand for larger vehicles has risen significantly,” says a report released last year by the Global Fuel Economy Initiative (GFEI), a partnership between the United Nations, the International Energy Agency, and others. This “has led to a slackening – or in some cases even reversal – of national rates of fuel consumption improvements.”
Full article here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
January 25, 2021 at 03:33AM
