Skimming low over the gleaming white glaciers on Greenland’s coast in a modified 1940s plane, three NASA scientists, led by an Elvis-impersonating oceanographer, waited to drop a probe into the water beneath them.

They are part of Oceans Melting Greenland — or OMG — a mission that has flown around the vast island for four summers, dropping probes to collect data on how oceans contribute to the rapid melt of Greenland’s ice.

Willis is investigating how warmer layers of water off the coast come into contact with glaciers.

Dressed in a blue jumpsuit and with thick sideburns that give a hint of his occasional pastime impersonating Elvis, Joshua Willis, 44, is the oceanographer from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory behind the project – and, along with his wife, its name.

Three NASA scientists drop probes into the Arctic to measure the impact of the oceans on ice melt.

‘Ice cube under a hair dryer’

Willis is investigating how warmer layers of water off the coast come into contact with glaciers and how this effects how quickly they melt.

“A lot of people think of the ice here as melting from the air warming, sort of like an ice cube under a hair dryer, but in fact the oceans are also eating away at the ice’s edges,” Willis said.

The scientists are part of Oceans Melting Greenland or OMG.

OMG surveys Greenlandic glaciers in the winter, comparing it with the data they collect about the oceans in the summer over a five-year period, which Willis hopes will allow researchers to better predict sea-level rise.

Greenland ‘a challenge’

NASA — best known for the moon landings and space travel — started to study the earth’s climate in greater depth from the 1970s when its inter-planetary exploration budget was reduced, using its satellites to look at the earth.

With OMG, Willis hopes they can provide data to give better predictions of sea-level rise.

Today it has more than a dozen satellites in orbit monitoring earth’s seas, ice, land and atmosphere, along with missions like OMG, which Willis hopes will provide data to give better predictions of sea-level rise around the globe.

Agence France-Presse

The Swedish climate truthsayer Greta Thunberg has set sail for the United States in a zero-emissions racing yacht to generate waves in a different part of the world – including at next month’s United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York. She will arrive in America at a time of growing transatlantic awareness of the threat posed by climate change. But whether shifts in public opinion will translate into concrete action remains to be seen.
Taking sustainability seriously means that we can no longer ignore our planetary boundaries. We need to start designing tools and policies to make all aspects of society more sustainable, before the costs of doing so become so large as to impoverish us. This has increasingly become a task not just for academics who specialise in the field, but for scholars and researchers generally. Sustainability should now be the lens through which we approach all policy-related empirical questions. We need challenge-driven, mission-oriented research, and that calls for a broad multidisciplinary effort.
To that end, Michael Grubb of the University of Cambridge, along with two co-authors, made a monumental contribution with his 2014 book Planetary Economics: Energy, Climate Change, and the Three Domains of Sustainable Development. Grubb marshals a broad range of tools from within the economics discipline to chart the way to a sustainable society. That framework will need to be broadened beyond economics, but it provides a useful starting point.
The “three domains” in the book’s subtitle concern human behaviour, and how it can be influenced through regulation, traditional market-based pricing, and innovation. Transforming a system requires action in all three areas. For example, better regulation can change human behaviour in a way that reduces prices and spurs innovation, in turn yielding even better regulation and lower costs.
Unfortunately, these three traditional domains within economics have each evolved separately, developing their own languages, evidence, policy recommendations, professional societies, and journals. The goal of a “planetary economics” is to integrate the domains within a single community, whose sole objective is to build a civilisation that can exist within Earth’s boundaries.
This is already happening on the margins. Evolutionary and institutional economists are talking to organisational and behavioural economists about how individual social and economic choices make up complex systems over time. Complexity economists like W Brian Arthur have been studying such questions for decades. And, in parallel, “Solow Residual” economists have drawn on all three domains to make sense of unexplained factors in economic growth.
But this multidisciplinary intermingling is not happening nearly fast enough. What we need is a new field of planetary social science to unite different perspectives, conceptual frameworks, and analytical tools – from political science, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Just as we cannot ignore the climate science, nor can we ignore the geopolitical and security challenges that will confront a warming planet.
Beyond the participation of individual consumers, private corporations, and civil society, building a sustainable global economy will require active state intervention. Governments urgently must adjust regulatory frameworks, reset market incentives, and expand the hard and soft infrastructure needed for innovation to thrive. Moreover, policymakers should be prepared to take calculated risks, and to recalibrate policies based on feedback.
The sub-discipline that has perhaps come closest to integrating other disciplines, including medicine and environmental science, is public health. In Survival: One Health, One Planet, One Future, George R Lueddeke, the chair of the One Health Education Task Force, shows how public health can be incorporated into a wide range of fields to address individual, population, and ecosystem health.
Another crucial area, of course, is education. In 2015, the international community adopted the UN’s 2030 Agenda and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, one of which (SDG 4) regards high-quality universal education as a key to building “peaceful, just, and inclusive societies.” Yet progress toward this goal, particularly in developing countries, is being hampered by inequality, poverty, financial shortfalls, extremism, and armed conflict.
In advanced economies, education systems need to prepare students for a world that is undergoing fundamental social, economic, and technological change. Young people today will need the skills not just to cope with the ongoing transformation, but to lead it. That means education policy, too, must become challenge-driven. In practical terms, every university should consider creating a compulsory course on systems thinking and cross-disciplinary approaches.
Meanwhile, public- and private-sector organisations around the world are being asked to integrate the SDGs into their daily operations. In Survival, 17 organisations, ranging from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to the World Wildlife Fund, tell Lueddeke how they are adopting a more multidisciplinary approach. But, in general, it is clear that many – if not most – countries have yet to consider the costs of implementing the SDGs fully. Without their active participation, success is unlikely.
In fact, most national finance ministries have not fully bought into the 2030 Agenda. In advocating sustainability, we must not create new vulnerabilities in the form of over-indebtedness. Recent experience shows that financial crises can rapidly undermine economic and political achievements, sometimes reversing decades of development or jeopardising future economic growth and stability.
As Greta Thunberg steps onto new shores, those in power should consider their responsibility to all generations. We urgently need to create the conditions for the emergence of a planetary social science that can inform our policy decisions. Ultimately, the planet will carry on. But whether humanity survives will depend on the leadership shown today, and on the systems of governance and scholarship that we build for the future. There is nothing like the prospect of extinction to focus the mind. – Project Syndicate

* Erik Berglof is professor and Director of the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Climate change is probably the biggest threat facing humanity today. According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world must cut its carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2050 in order to prevent global warming of 1.5°C, or likely more, above pre-industrial levels in this century. The challenge calls for drastic immediate action, because the infrastructure investments the world makes today will determine the carbon intensity of its growth path for decades.
Yet despite widespread recognition of the size and urgency of the climate challenge, emissions continue to increase, land is “under growing human pressure,” and the Amazon has never been more threatened.
Much of the early climate debate revolved around whether the world should take drastic immediate action to mitigate global warming, or adopt a more gradual approach. The gradualists argued with some success that drastic immediate measures would impose heavy short-term economic costs.
But three recent developments have altered the course of the debate. First, the various feedback loops triggered by global warming now threaten to cause greater and more imminent damage than previously thought.
Second, the cost of clean energy has declined much faster than previously assumed. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, renewable-energy sources are already the cheapest power option in much of the world, with solar and wind technologies leading the way. Moreover, the cost of “greening” could fall even faster in the future through learning-by-doing. This is also likely to be the case in urban design, transportation, agriculture, and forest protection, all of which need to undergo a green transition.
Finally, the immediate negative externalities of the world’s current high-carbon growth model, such as air pollution, are now better recognised as adding to the short-term cost of climate change. Reducing them would therefore partially offset the upfront cost of mitigation.
These shifts greatly strengthen the case for pursuing much faster and bolder forms of mitigation. As the 2014 New Climate Economy Report concluded, there need not be a tradeoff between growth and forceful climate action, even in the short term.
So, why is more not being done? For starters, although the green transition may have a small net aggregate cost, it is certain to generate losers (as well as winners). And as is often the case with such transitions (for example with trade liberalisation), the gains will be spread across large parts of the population, while the losses will be more concentrated on specific groups, making them more visible and politically disruptive.
When advocating policies that result in aggregate welfare gains, economists often fail to give enough consideration to their likely distributional impact. Instead, they often implicitly assume that the winners will compensate the losers. But if such compensation does not actually occur, the losers are left worse off and can often block change, as the “yellow vest” protesters (gilets jaunes) have done since 2018, when the French government proposed a new climate-friendly fuel tax.
The de facto coalition that is currently resisting climate action consists of the vested interests that own carbon-intensive assets (such as oil companies) and the mostly lower-income groups that would be short-term losers in a rapid transition. Compensating the latter and isolating the former is politically essential.
Unfortunately, it is not clear whether, say, the young German urbanites who voted for the Greens in the European Parliament elections this year would happily compensate the older auto workers – let alone Polish coal miners – who would suffer in a rapid transition. And complicating matters further, the groups at risk of short-term losses from green policies are often bearing the brunt of digitisation and globalisation, too.
Another hurdle to bold action is that climate protection constitutes an “additive” global public good, because there is only one atmosphere and the emissions of any one country add to global greenhouse-gas concentrations as much as those of any other country. This causes the free-rider problem of “carbon leakage.” Europe may well reduce its emissions in line with (or even beyond) the aims of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, but if India and China’s emissions keep increasing – or if Brazil allows the Amazon to collapse – those efforts will have been futile.
Clearly, the whole world would benefit from a co-operative solution. But without a binding international agreement or a supranational authority that can impose global green policies, few countries have an incentive to engage in sufficient mitigation efforts – leaving everyone worse off.
One possible measure to deter free riding is a carbon border tax, as recently proposed by the incoming president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. Governments that tax carbon could levy a border tax equal to the implicit subsidy given to their “dirty” exports by governments who do not have such a tax. This would effectively impose a kind of shadow carbon price on free riders, prompting them to produce fewer carbon-intensive goods.
Provided that it is non-discriminatory, such border pricing would enhance global welfare and be compatible with World Trade Organisation rules. But calculating the appropriate tax would be very difficult in practice. It would, for example, necessitate calculating the tax equivalent of regulatory ceilings. The measure may also invite countries like the United States to retaliate with distortive measures, making it somewhat perilous. Moreover, the tax would likely have regressive distributional consequences, hurting poor countries the most. A better strategy, then, is to increase green investment in developing countries substantially, with multilateral development banks catalysing private financing in addition to their own funds.
Distributional issues – not aggregate costs – are the real obstacle to the ambitious policies needed to avert possibly catastrophic climate change. Similar challenges, at both the national and international level, also affect the transitions entailed by the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Neo-nationalist populists are already feeding on the fears created by disruptive change. Ambitious carbonisation could further fan these flames if it is not accompanied by social policies that effectively ease the process. Progressives everywhere must therefore unite in support not only of a rapid green transition, but of one that is politically feasible and desirable for the vast majority of citizens – even in the short run. – Project Syndicate

l Kemal Dervis, former Minister of Economic Affairs of Turkey and former Administrator for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), is Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Sebastián Strauss is a senior research analyst and Co-ordinator for Strategic Engagements at the Brookings Institution. Follow him on Twitter: @Seba_Strauss

The incoming president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has laid out a highly ambitious climate agenda. In her first 100 days in office, she intends to propose a European Green Deal, as well as legislation that would commit the European Union to becoming carbon neutral by 2050. Her immediate priority will be to step up efforts to reduce the EU’s greenhouse-gas emissions, with the aggressive new goal of halving them (relative to 1990 levels) by 2030. The issue now is how to make this huge transition politically and economically sustainable.
Von der Leyen’s programme reflects growing concern over climate change among European citizens. Even before the continent’s recent heat wave, protests by high-school students and the surge in support for Green parties in the European Parliament election had been a wake-up call for politicians. Many now regard climate action not only as a responsibility to future generations, but also as a duty to today’s youth. And political parties fear that dithering could lose them support among huge numbers of voters under 40.
In truth, however, the EU (including the United Kingdom) is a minor contributor to climate change these days. Member states’ combined share of global CO2 emissions has declined from 99% two centuries ago to less than 10% today (in annual, not cumulative terms). And this figure could fall to 5% by 2030 if the EU meets von der Leyen’s emissions target by that date.
While the EU will undertake the painful task of cutting its annual emissions by 1.5bn tonnes, in 2030 the rest of the world will likely have increased them by 8.5bn tonnes. Average global temperatures will therefore continue to rise, possibly by 3C or more by 2100. Whatever Europe does will not save the planet.
How Europe deals with this frontrunner’s curse will be critical. The von der Leyen plan will inevitably cost jobs, curtail wealth, reduce incomes, and restrict economic opportunities, at least initially. Without an EU strategy for turning the moral imperative of climate action into a trump card, it won’t be tenable. A backlash will come, with ugly political consequences.
So what strategy might Europe adopt? One option is to bet on leading by example. By building an environmentally friendly development model, Europe and other climate pioneers would establish a path for others to take. And non-binding international agreements such as the 2015 Paris climate agreement would help to monitor progress, thereby pushing laggard governments to act.
But because climate preservation is a classic public good, climate coalitions are inherently unstable – and larger ones create even more incentive for members to defect and free-ride on others’ efforts. Leadership by example is thus unlikely to suffice.
Alternatively, Europe could build on its first-mover advantage to develop a competitive edge in new green technologies, products, and services. As Philippe Aghion and colleagues have argued, innovation can help tap the potential of such technologies and start changing the direction of economic development.
There are encouraging signs: the cost of solar panels has fallen faster than anticipated, and renewables are now more competitive than had been expected even ten years ago. Unfortunately, however, Europe has failed to convert climate action into industrial leadership. Most solar panels and electric batteries are produced in China, and the United States is its only serious competitor.
Europe’s remaining card is the size of its market, which still accounts for some 25% of world consumption. Because no global firm can afford to ignore it, the EU is a major regulatory power in areas such as consumer safety and privacy. Moreover, European standards often gain wider currency, because manufacturers and service providers that have adapted to demanding EU requirements tend to adhere to them in other markets, too.
The EU’s bet is that the combination of its own strong commitment to decarbonisation and the much softer, but global, Paris climate agreement will lead firms to redirect research and investment toward green technologies. Even if other countries do not set ambitious targets, the argument goes, enough investment may be redirected to make green development more affordable for all countries.
Yet current progress in this regard is clearly insufficient to curb global emissions and keep the global increase in temperature this century well below 2C above pre-industrial levels, as the Paris agreement stipulates. For example, global coal-powered capacity is still growing, because China and India are building plants faster than the US and Europe are dismantling them.
Europe is therefore short of tools that could make its transition to carbon neutrality economically and politically sustainable. In her address to the European Parliament, von der Leyen dropped a bomb: she promised to introduce a border tax aimed at preventing “carbon leakage,” or the relocation of carbon-intensive production to countries outside the EU.
Such a tax will win applause from environmentalists, who (often wrongly) believe that trade is bad for the world’s climate. More important, the measure would both correct competitive distortions and deter those tempted to abstain from taking part in the global climate coalition. As long as there is no binding climate agreement, a carbon border tax makes economic sense.
Yet such a tax won’t fly easily. Committed free traders (or what remains of them) will cry foul. Importers will protest. Developing countries and the US (unless it changes course) will portray the measure as protectionist aggression. And an already crumbling global trade system will suffer a new shock.
It is ironic that the new leaders of the EU, which has relentlessly championed open markets, will likely trigger a conflict between climate preservation and free trade. But this clash is unavoidable. How it is managed will determine both the fate of globalisation and that of the climate. – Project Syndicate

*Jean Pisani-Ferry, a professor at the Hertie School of Governance (Berlin) and Sciences Po (Paris), holds the Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa chair at the European University Institute and is a senior fellow at Bruegel, a Brussels-based think tank.

Aug 1, 2019 ADAIR TURNER

Wind turbines may be carbon-free, but they’re not recyclable.

A photograph of dozens of giant turbine blades dumped into a Wyoming landfill touched off a debate Wednesday on Twitter about wind power’s environmental drawbacks. The argument may be only beginning.

Fiberglass turbine blades — which in some cases are as long a football field — aren’t easy to recycle. And with BloombergNEF expecting up to 2 gigawatts worth of turbines to be refitted this year and next, there could be heaps more headed for dumps.

Cynthia Langston, solid waste division manager for the city of Casper, declined to say where the turbine debris came from. But she’s happy to have it. The 1,000 blades will bring in about $675,000 for the landfill, helping keep trash costs low for local residents. Plus, Langston said, wind-farm junk is less toxic than other garbage.

“It’s much cleaner than the contaminated soil and demolition projects from the oil and gas industry,” Langston said in an interview. “These are about as non-toxic as you can get.”

Wind turbine blades represent a “vanishingly small fraction” of overall waste in the U.S., according to the American Wind Energy Association.

Sachin Shah, chief executive officer of one of the world’s largest clean-power operators, Brookfield Renewable Partners LP, said “there will be an aggressive effort to re-use materials” in the years ahead.

By Mark Paul

SARASOTA — US President Donald Trump’s anti-climate agenda is in full swing. His administration has already taken action 117 times to repeal or weaken climate regulations, and much more deregulation is in the works. By unravelling environmental protections on an unprecedented scale, including through executive orders, Trump is using every tool at his disposal to increase fossil-fuel extraction and the production of dirty energy. Apparently, he is hell-bent on topping his predecessor’s own fossil-fuel boom.

That is right, former President Barack Obama presided over a fossil-fuel boom: the domestic shale-energy revolution enabled by the advent of hydraulic fracturing (or fracking). The fact is that neither major party in the United States has been the climate champion that the country and the world needs. While young activists around the world are stepping up to show what true climate leadership looks like, politicians are barely taking note. As Dianne Feinstein, a Democratic US senator from California, dismissively told a group of young people advocating a Green New Deal (GND): “I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what I’m doing.”

The longer both parties cling to a policy of “business as usual”, the more likely we are to face a climate catastrophe in which millions of people perish or have their lives upended. In reality, though, the responsibility for adopting a new paradigm ultimately rests with the Democrats. While Trump has been disastrous for the planet, his administration’s policies are in keeping with a Republican Party that will not change anytime soon.

In a recent review of more than 1,000 climate-related bills introduced in the US Congress since 2000, we found that, in the past decade alone, Republicans presented 187 that would increase greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions. Most of these bills have sought to advance the interests of the fossil-fuel industry over those of everyone else. The Republicans’ purported rationale is to achieve “energy independence,” which, in practice, has meant offering special treatment to the oil, gas and coal companies that spend exorbitant amounts on campaign contributions.

Not long after coming to office, Trump promised that by unleashing America’s fossil-fuel reserves, his administration would “create countless jobs for our people, and provide true energy security to our friends, partners and allies all across the globe”. Following the same logic, Don Young, a Republican congressman representing Alaska, has introduced the American Energy Independence and Job Creation Act, which would allow exploration and extraction of oil and gas reserves in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Adding insult to injury, the bill would direct half of the tax revenues generated by the exploitation of public resources to a pot of incentives for the fossil-fuel industry.

But the real insult is the behavior of Democratic leaders, who continue to abide by what James K. Boyce of the University of Massachusetts calls “climate-change denial lite”. Consider the case of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Last year, the DNC decided that it would no longer accept contributions from political action committees affiliated with the fossil-fuel industry, only to reverse course and embrace an “all-of-the-above” energy policy just months later.

Though congressional Democrats have introduced modest proposals to curtail GHG emissions, they have not made any major push for climate legislation since the failed American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (the Waxman-Markey bill). And even that bill would not have reduced emissions fast enough, relative to what the climate crisis demands.

Among the more meaningful climate bills introduced by Democrats in recent years is the 100 by ‘50 Act, which includes provisions to “achieve 100 per cent clean and renewable energy by 2050”. But, again, this falls far short of what is needed to limit global warming to 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels, the threshold beyond which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts devastating consequences.

Fortunately, a growing chorus of Democrats has begun to demand genuine action that would start to make up for decades of climate-change denialism lite. They understand that without significant, comprehensive action by the US, the climate cannot possibly be stabilised at a level that is still conducive to human flourishing.

Rather than talking about what people must give up to reduce emissions, the climate realists are trying to sell voters on a new vision of the economy, one that offers long-term economic security and environmental stability. The GND resolution introduced earlier this year has rapidly shifted the window of discourse, such that once-radical proposals are now garnering public support and being debated seriously.

Though the details of the GND still need to be fleshed out, Democratic presidential contenders such as Washington Governor Jay Inslee are already offering concrete proposals in accordance with its prescriptions. The GND could be the “north star” of the country’s decarbonisation path. But much will depend on Democratic congressional leaders such as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who has scoffed at ambitious climate proposals as a “green dream.” Either that changes, or we will all find ourselves in an environmental nightmare.

Mark Paul is an assistant professor of economics at New College of Florida. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2019. www.project-syndicate.org

http://jordantimes.com/opinion/project-syndicate/americas-bipartisan-climate-policy-failure

Time is running out for car makers in Europe. Just six months out from stiff new emissions rules, the industry is facing up to an estimated €34bn ($39bn) in penal- ties as well as eroding profits from selling more electric cars. Starting in 2020, car fleets in Europe will need to meet more stringent regulations on how much carbon dioxide they’re allowed to release. The industry is ill prepared for the looming change, and the huge fines pending for subverting the new rules could prompt some brands to abandon the European market and test the mettle of those that remain. The threat is part of a broader pileup: vehicle sales are falling in key markets around the world, and the US is exchang- ing blows on trade with China and the European Union, threatening to raise costs and rattle the global economy. Worse yet, automakers have been unable to pry buyers from the highest-emission cars, such as the Mercedes-AMG GLE 63 S sport utility vehicle that spouts more than three times the car maker’s targeted CO2 fleet level from 2020. “In an industry that is already suff ering from global trade issues, from Brexit, from peaking sales, that’s a very, very danger- ous cocktail,” Evercore IS auto analyst Arndt Ellinghorst said on a call earlier this month regarding the EU emissions issue.

Fines could mount to €34bn through 2021, according to research firm Jato Dynamics, whose projection tracks with other indus- try estimates. While the new regulations are expected to be painful for the industry to adjust to, past precedent suggests the EU is unlikely to allow Europe-based carmakers to be driven to ruin. Volkswagen AG, the world’s biggest car- maker, faces the largest penalty at about €9bn based on 2018 reported emissions, followed by Peugeot maker PSA Group and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV — the company with the single largest gap between actual performance and the new targets. BMW AGand Daimler AG could see earnings drop sharply due to their heavy reliance on high-emission SUVs. Toyota Motor Corp, maker of the Prius and several other hybrids, was the only automaker to see its emissions fall last year in Europe, according to Jato. While its calculation doesn’t take into account a blitz of upcoming electric models like Volkswa- gen’s ID.3 hatchback and Porsche Taycan, European Environment Agency data show emissions rising — not falling — for the past two years to a four-year high in 2018. Fumes are emitted from the exhaust pipe of an Audi in London. A Volkswagen spokesman reiterated recent comments by off icials including chief executive of- ficer Herbert Diess that it’s the company’s goal to meet European emission limits. A spokesman for BMW said paying fines wasn’t a strategic option, and the company on Tuesday brought forward its planned rollout of electric cars by two years. Daim- ler said its plan to reach the targets also depended on customer decisions. “It’s not quite an existential problem yet, but there are going to be questions of how do you explain to shareholders that I’m losing so much money, and it’s going to create immense pressure,” Michael Schweikl, managing consultant responsi- ble for automotive at PA Consulting Group, said in an interview. Starting January 1, all but 5% of the EU’s car fleet can emit no more than 95 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre driven. One year later, no new vehicle can exceed that level.

Fines of 95 euros per gram for each car over the target will add up quickly, driving automakers to speed up the electrification of their lineups by of- fering more gasoline-electric hybrids and cars fully powered by batteries. “I have never seen such a material event risk in my career,” Evercore’s Ellinghorst warned in a research note to clients last month under the subject line “The 2020 CO2 cliff .” Automakers aren’t panicking — yet. PSA expects to be compliant from day one and won’t pay any fines, a spokesman said. However, in 2018, sales of EVs and hybrid vehicles accounted for less than 1% of PSA’s registered sales. The quandary on CO2 doesn’t end there, because in addition to being less popular, low-emission cars are much less profitable than the rest of automakers’ fleets. At Volkswagen, less than 1% of sales were plug-ins or battery cars last year, and about 6% at BMW. An analysis by UBS last year estimated Ebit margins on Tesla Inc’s Model 3 sedan were, at best, half those of BMW’s gasoline-powered 330i model.

The push for electrification in Europe means selling mass-market vehicles there will be unprofitable “for a decade or two,” John Murphy, an auto analyst for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said during a presentation this month in Detroit. The 2020 limits were agreed to in 2014 after years of back-and-forth on balanc- ing a reduction in emissions while not costing carmakers too much. What no one foresaw was the extent of consumers’ love aff air with gas-guzzling SUVs and Volkswa- gen’s diesel-emissions cheating scandal that surfaced the following year. Diesels, which emit about a fifth less CO2 than equivalent gasoline cars, were a key plank in carmakers meeting the tighter regulation. But some European cities have started to ban diesels, leaving the cars to languish on dealer lots. “The top automakers will face trouble as none of them are currently on track to meet the target,” Jato Dynamics said in an April blog post. “The incoming CO2 targets can be seen as the apocalypse of the car industry in Europe.” The new rules may prompt some brands without a strong presence in Europe to abandon the market altogether, said Ellinghorst, though he declined to specify which might do so. General Motors Co already eff ectively withdrew in 2017 when it sold the Opel brand to PSA. Companies without fully-electric vehicles in Europe such as Ford Motor Co and Japan’s Mazda Motor Corp face steep challenges. Honda Motor Co does too, but it plans to launch a small battery-electric model later this year. Ford said in a statement it expects to meet the 2020-2021 targets, but that its longer- term strategy in Europe through 2030 “assumes a strong uptake of electrified vehicles” by consumers. Representatives for Mazda had no immediate comment. If the industry fails to clear the new bar set by regulators, it won’t be the first time.

When many automakers missed the boat on the switch to new emissions testing in September, it was nearly enough to send Europe’s largest economy into recession. Employees work on BMW i3 electric cars on the assembly line at a factory in Leip- zig, Germany. Simply selling more small cars won’t help, as even the most fuel-eff icient gas-pow- ered vehicles also face tougher mandates. Carmakers aren’t likely to be able to pass along the added costs for equipping those cars with cleaner technology, Bernstein analyst Max Warburton wrote in a recent report. He said that may lead to “the death of the small car” in Europe. The regulations do allow for some creative ways to lower average fleet emissions and mitigate penalties, at least during a phase- in period. Cars that emit less than 50 grams CO2 per kilometre will count for two cars in 2020, and slightly less each year after. Fiat Chrysler has also made use of the op- tion to pool fleets of high-emission autos with low- or zero-polluting cars, pairing up with Tesla Inc in a deal that likely will involve paying the US company several hundred million dollars. Mazda and Toyota are also forming a pool. “I think that 2020 is doable. The concern is about customer acceptance for new technology,” said Antonio Massacesi, head of fuel economy and greenhouse gas compliance for Fiat Chrysler’s European business. “That risk is one of the reasons why we decided to enter into a pool with Tesla.”