Climate & emissions
More e-vehicles, please
In November this year, Delhi woke up – again – to a thick smog covering the city. No one was surprised. It wasn’t the first time it had happened. And so chief minister Arvind Kejriwal again announced the odd-even programme to curb the number of cars on the roads and thus reduce pollution.
What might help in the long run – not just in Delhi but across the country – is the target, set in 2013, to achieve a year-on-year sale of 6-7 million hybrid and electric vehicles from
15-16million the expected cumulative sales of hybrid and electric vehicles in India by 2020
2020 onwards or a cumulative sales of 15-16 million by 2020. (Road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari was quoted in the media in 2017 as saying that India will have 100% e-vehicles by 2030, which was later revised, to set a target of having only electric three-wheelers in the country by 2023, followed by electric-only two-wheelers by 2025. 30% of all vehicles are targeted to be e-vehicles by 2030.)
But as Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director (research and advocacy), Centre for Science and Environment, says, targets work only when they are backed by mandates. “In India, the government gives some incentives for the use of e-vehicles, but there has to be a mandate to push sales, there has to be an ecosystem to make it user-friendly, there have to be charging slots available, for example.” In the absence of all that, figures released this year showed that till May, the country had only about 0.28 million e-vehicles.
EU to go green
In December 1952, a lethal smog caused by a combination of industrial pollution and high-pressure weather conditions, covered London for five days. The British capital was no stranger to smogs. In 1915, TS Eliot, in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, talks of the “yellow fog” , the “yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes”. But if the severity of the problem then pushed the UK to pass the Clean Air Act of 1956, in 2007 the fear of pollution, climate change and loss of resources made the EU as a whole adopt the Climate and Energy Package 2020.
Targets include a 20% reduction in emission of greenhouse gases from the 1990 levels, drawing 20% of energy needs from renewable resources and achieving a 20% improvement in energy efficiency. A news report published in March this year suggests that Europe is well on its way to achieving the first target, with “EU GHG emissions, including emissions from international aviation and indirect CO2 emissions” already “down by 22.4 percent compared with 1990 levels.”