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ENVIRONMENT

German climate groups plan legal action against car giants

German environmental groups on Friday announced a legal offensive against car giants Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW to force them to reduce emissions faster, emboldened by recent court victories in favour of climate protection.

German climate groups plan legal action against car giants
The DUH have long fought for cleaner air. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | David Inderlied

Greenpeace Germany and Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH) said they have sent a claim letter to the three carmakers asking them to commit to more ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions, including ending production of fossil-fuel cars by 2030.

If they do not respond to the letter in the coming weeks and halt their “illegal behaviour”, the NGOs said they are ready to file lawsuits in court.

“We are holding those companies to account that have been destroying our climate for years,” DUH executive director Sascha Mueller-Kraenner told a press conference.

While all three car companies have announced plans to transition from diesel and petrol cars to more environmentally-friendly electric vehicles, the plaintiffs say their goals are vague and non-binding.

“The companies’ electrification plans are not ambitious enough and too slow. They won’t be enough to avert the climate crisis,” said Greenpeace’s Martin Kaiser.

A fourth company, German oil and gas firm Wintershall Dea, is also being targeted in the legal proceedings for its role in the climate emergency.

The complaints, if they go ahead, would be a first in Germany.

The plaintiffs are basing their case on a landmark verdict by Germany’s constitutional court in April which found that Germany’s plans to curb CO2 emissions were insufficient to meet the targets of the Paris climate agreement and placed an unfair burden on future generations.

In a major win for activists, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government then brought forward its date for carbon neutrality by five years to 2045, and raised its 2030 target for greenhouse gas reductions.

Greenpeace’s Kaiser said the plaintiffs also received “a tailwind” from a court ruling in the Netherlands in May, which ordered oil giant Shell to slash its carbon emissions by 2030.

‘No basis’

Fridays for Future activist Clara Mayer, who is acting as a plaintiff in the case against VW, said recent deadly floods in western Germany had shown that the climate emergency “is now right outside our front door”.

She said VW, as one of the world’s largest carmakers and a major CO2 emitter, had “an immense responsibility”.

The 12-brand group, which also includes Audi, Porsche and Skoda, said in a statement that it did not believe the campaigner’s legal route was “an appropriate way to solve important societal challenges”.

It added that VW was investing 35 billion euros ($41 billion) in its bid to become a global leader in electric vehicles by 2025.

Mercedes-Benz maker Daimler meanwhile said it “sees no basis” for the injunction demand and vowed to defend itself “through all legal means” should it come to a lawsuit.

Luxury carmaker BMW reiterated that the company was committed to the Paris climate agreement, which aims to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial levels.

The spectre of legal action against the car manufacturers comes just days before the IAA auto show, one of the world’s biggest, opens its doors in Munich.

Climate campaigners have vowed to stage protests to disrupt the event.

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‘Città 30’: Which Italian cities will bring in new speed limits?

Bologna has faced heavy criticism - including from the Italian government - after introducing a speed limit of 30km/h, but it's not the only city to approve these rules.

'Città 30': Which Italian cities will bring in new speed limits?

Bologna on January 17th became Italy’s first major city to introduce a speed limit of 30km/h on 70 percent of roads in the city centre under its ‘Città 30’ plan, first announced in 2022, and initially set to come into force by June 2023.

The move made Bologna one of a growing number of European cities, including Paris, Madrid, Brussels, and Bilbao, to bring in a 30km/h limit aimed at improving air quality and road safety.

But the change was met last week with a go-slow protest by Bologna’s taxi drivers and, perhaps more surprisingly, criticism from the Italian transport ministry, which financed the measure.

Matteo Salvini, who is currently serving as Italy’s transport minister, this week pledged to bring in new nationwide rules dictating speed limits in cities that would reverse Bologna’s new rule.

Salvini’s League party has long criticised Bologna’s ‘Città 30’ plan, claiming it would make life harder for residents as well as people working in the city and would create “more traffic and fines”.

OPINION: Italians and their cars are inseparable – will this ever change?

Bologna’s speed limit has sparked a heated debate across Italy, despite the increasingly widespread adoption of such measures in many other cities in Europe and worldwide in recent years.

While Bologna is the biggest Italian city to bring in the measure, it’s not the first – and many more local authorities, including in Rome, are now looking to follow their example in the next few years.

Some 60 smaller cities and towns in Italy have adopted the measure so far, according to Sky TG24, though there is no complete list.

This compares to around 200 French towns and cities to adopt the rule, while in Spain the same limit has applied to 70 percent of all the country’s roads since since May 2021 under nationwide rules, reports LA7.

The first Italian town to experiment with a 30 km/h speed limit was Cesena, south of Bologna, which introduced it in 1998. Since then, the local authority has found that serious accidents have halved, while the number of non-serious ones has remained unchanged.

Olbia, in Sardinia, also famously introduced the speed limit in 2021.

The city of Parma is planning to bring in the same rules from 2024, while the Tuscan capital of Florence approved five 30km/h zones in the city centre earlier this month.

Turin is set to bring in its first 30km/h limits this year as part of its broader plan to improve transport infrastructure, aimed at reducing smog and increasing livability.

READ ALSO: Why electric cars aren’t more popular in Italy

Meanwhile, the mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri, has promised to introduce the limit on 70 percent of the capital’s roads by the end of his mandate, which expires in 2026.

In Milan, while the city council has voted in favour of lower speed limits and other traffic limitations on central roads, it’s not clear when these could come into force.

Milan mayor Beppe Sala this week said a 30 km/h limit would be “impossible” to implement in the Lombardy capital.

And it’s notable that almost all of the cities looking at slowing down traffic are in the north or centre-north of Italy.

There has been little interest reported in the measures further south, where statistics have shown there are a higher number of serious road accidents – though the total number of accidents is in fact higher in the north.

According to the World Health Organisation the risk of death to a pedestrian hit by a car driven at 50 km/h is 80 percent. The risk drops to 10 percent at 30 km/h.

The speed limit on roads in Italian towns and cities is generally 50, and on the autostrade (motorways) it’s up to 130.

Many Italian residents are heavily dependent on cars as their primary mode of transport: Italy has the second-highest rate of car ownership in Europe, with 670 vehicles per 1,000 residents, second only to Luxembourg with 682, according to statistics agency Eurostat.

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