Taking a Systemic View – A Sustainable Mixture of Drive Technologies Must Be Based on Fundamental Facts and Has to Consider the Full Product Life Cycle

Authors

Dr. D. Bothe, T. Steinfort, Frontier Economics, Cologne; D. Goericke, FVV e.V., Frankfurt:

Year

2021

Print Info

Production/Publication ÖVK

Summary

This paper is to large parts based on our study "Cradle-to-Grave Life-Cycle Assessment in the Mobility Sector" on behalf of the FVV. The full version and additional information is available online via https://www.primemovers.de/en/science/taking-stock.
In the context of the Paris agreement the European Union and Germany have set themselves ambitious climate protection targets, which has been further broken down by the German government into individual sector targets, e.g. for energy, buildings or transport. These micro-targets promotes thinking within limited geographical or sectoral borders, which may jeopardise efforts to achieve climate protection targets cost-efficiently. We argue in this paper, that this policy approach doesn’t reflect the global nature of CO₂ emissions and will likely fail to sufficiently consider the budget principle, which underlies climate change. Instead we demonstrate, that a clear roadmap is needed to define the pathway to carbon neutral mobility, which again has to be informed by a comprehensive technology analysis taking into accounts life-cycle effects. Based on a Meta-Analysis of more than 80 studies with nearly 500 scenarios on the effects of various drive train technologies we conclude, that from a climate protection perspective, no single drive train technology comes out on top. Therefore current policy approaches which try to drive defossilisation by a switch of drive trains (e.g. electrification) often only result in a shift of emissions to other sectors and geographies rather than a genuine reduction of emissions. With regard to the future regulatory framework we derive key recommendations on how to support the formation of an technology mix to effectively defossilise mobility.

Number of pages

12 Order