Emissions from transport in the EU make up nearly a quarter of its carbon footprint.

Every car on every road in Europe contributes to climate change. And there are a lot of cars around – I only need to look out of my window to see the growing amounts of traffic on the roads. Car ownership in the European Union rose by 25% in the ten years from 1995. These figures are no good for the climate and unless people stop driving, something else has to happen to stop car emissions levels rising even more.

Though many of us knew about the dangers for climate change a lot earlier, it was only in 1992 that the world began the slow process of taking action to combat climate change. It seems strange looking back that before 1995 there were no targets on CO2 emissions and car manufacturers could get way with what they liked as long as the car would sell.

But something had to change – even the car industry knew that.

So when the European Commission began to look at CO2 emission targets back in the early 90s, the car industry jumped in with offers to help. They said they could reduce emissions from new cars to an average of 140g per kilometre by 2008.

If that sounds like a significant improvement on the 1995 levels of 186g per km, it’s important to note that the original EU target was a significant 20g less at 120g per km. And bear in mind that even if the emissions come down per car, the number of new cars coming onto our roads could easily wipe out that gain and leave emissions rising.

Since then although manufacturers have added some ‘eco models’ they carried on producing polluting cars and have popularised SUVs in European markets. The German car makers’ emissions actually increased in 2006. There are brightly coloured energy ratings on new cars but that hasn’t had much effect and the manufacturers carried on making their cars just as big and heavy while bamboozling us with crafty advertising showing us how good they were for the environment.

The trouble with this approach is that though they’d put off the day of CO2 reckoning, there was still a deadline to be met. More on that next time.