The sales ban should ban cars with a combustion engine. Germany and the EU have now agreed on this. There will still be room for cars that run on sustainable fuels, reports Frans Timmermans, the climate chief of the European Commission.
The plan contributes to reducing CO2 emissions and should help to make the EU climate neutral by 2050. Germany already agreed to the ban last year, but the country changed its mind.
The country demanded a guarantee at the last minute that cars will still be allowed to run on so-called e-fuels in the future. These are synthetic fuels that are made from electricity, biomass or carbon.
A future for the combustion engine is important for the many German makers of engine components. Germany found enough supporters to stop the ban for the time being, to the chagrin of many other EU member states and the European Commission.
After weeks of feverish consultations, an agreement has now been reached, Timmermans and the German transport minister Volker Wissing tweet. “We are now going to work on adopting the CO2 standards for cars as quickly as possible,” writes Timmermans.
The Commission will then soon come up with rules that will allow new cars to be sold on e-fuels after 2035. The rules do state that they can only fill up with those sustainable synthetic fuels and cannot secretly continue to drive on petrol or diesel, Wissing tweets.
There is a lot of criticism of the use of synthetic fuels, because a lot of green energy is needed to make them in a sustainable way.
