Green carmakers came to the Copenhagen summit to show that their eco cars are ready for action, writes BEN OLIVER
THE WORLD leaders, delegates and protestors crowding Copenhagen for the UN Climate Change Conference might be surprised to see billboards around the city announcing four major carmakers as event sponsors. With road transport accounting for 10 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions – a figure expected to rise to a quarter by 2050 – you might have thought car companies would be about as popular here as Japanese whalers at a marine biologist’s meeting.
Instead, not only has the UN taken on BMW, Mercedes, Volvo and Honda as partners, but the carmakers have arrived at Copenhagen arguing that governments and the energy companies aren’t doing enough to help them cut emissions.
The COP15 conference has attracted criticism for the size of its carbon footprint, with reports of hundreds of limos being driven in from Sweden and Germany to meet the demand from embassies, and so many private jets arriving at Copenhagen that some have had to fly to other airports to park. One American pressure group has posted a video on YouTube of delegates arriving at the Bella Centre by chauffeur-driven car rather than taking the fast, clean Metro or the free shuttle bus from the city centre.
Some have been caught getting out of their cars just around the corner from the entrance, and one appears to be taking a bicycle off a bike rack to ride the last few hundred metres.
The sponsoring carmakers are helping delegates unused to public transport to at least appear environmentally conscious by providing fleets of green cars that demonstrate most of the new technologies vying to replace the internal combustion engine. There are small-capacity, high-efficiency conventional petrol and diesel models such as BMW’s 520d and Volvo’s DRIVe models; petrol-electric hybrids such as Honda’s Insight and Mercedes’ S400 limo; and cars with conventional engines running on new fuels, like Volvo’s bioethanol-powered S80 and BMW’s prototype hydrogen-burning 7-series.
The most advanced models touring Copenhagen do away with conventional engines altogether. BMW’s Mini E is a battery-electric car capable of travelling 150 miles on a 2.5-hour charge, and both Honda and Mercedes have brought along hydrogen fuel-cell cars which create an electrical current by splitting the compressed hydrogen in their tanks into protons and electrons, and by recombining them with oxygen they create only water as a byproduct.
These more advanced technologies are expensive, and need an infrastructure of hydrogen filling stations or electric charging points.
The carmakers argue that governments need to offer more tax breaks to make electric and fuel-cell cars more affordable, and either encourage or force energy companies to start building recharging and refuelling networks. They’re using the Copenhagen summit to argue that the cars powered by these new technologies are more than just science projects; they’re reliable and ready for production. And they could bring some other, unexpected, benefits too such as making use of the unpredictable spikes in electricity production from wind and wave plants that is otherwise wasted when demand is low at night.
“COP15 is a very good platform for us,” says Thomas Brachmann, a senior engineer at Honda, which has brought two FCX Clarity fuel-cell cars to Copenhagen. Honda plans to build 200 of these elegant, practical hatchbacks and lease them – with a huge subsidy – to selected customers in the US and Japan, making it the world’s first commercially available fuel-cell car. The first customers include Jamie-Lee Curtis.
“We are always heavily criticised for not doing enough, but we are here to show that our alternative powertrains are already very advanced. There are politicians and NGOs here from all over the globe; they’re all talking about cutting CO2 but they don’t realise that some of the solutions are already available.
“The infrastructure is not as advanced as the cars. We think that’s the right way around. We have to demonstrate first that the technology works; if we don’t, the industry won’t do anything. The biggest obstacles are human beings. We need to have politicians on board, but they won’t do anything to help us unless they recognise that it is a suitable technology. If someone hops into this car in Copenhagen and asks what they can do for us, we’d just ask for a consistent policy approach.”
The message seems to be getting through. Denmark has waived its savage 180 per cent registration tax on new cars for electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles. Kristian Pihl Lorentzen, Danish Liberal Party spokesman on transport, says: “As politicians, we feel a real responsibility to help this process,” he says. “The high tax we have here – which shocks most foreigners – gives us an opportunity to make these cars affordable.”
But he warns that tax breaks to encourage electric and fuel-cell cars may not last once they’re commercially viable. “Like other states, we depend on cars for tax. We want to make reforms to encourage people to drive greener, but in the long term we still need to have almost the same income from cars.”
Even Greenpeace seems to accept that the car companies have something useful to contribute to COP15. “You can definitely feel the muscle of the big fossil-fuel interests here,” says its Copenhagen spokesman, Joss Garman. “And the car industry is very powerful politically, especially in countries like Germany. But we don’t think that they compromise COP15 by being here. We accept that they are making their perspective known and their agenda is transparent. There is clearly a big role for electric cars in future and Greenpeace supports that.
“The question is where the electricity comes from, and if the governments represented here don’t get that right, the benefits of millions of us switching to electric cars could be cancelled out by a few more coal-fired power stations.”
