BRUSSELS (LifeSiteNews) — The European Parliament (EUP) approved a plan Tuesday that would ban the sale of gas powered cars and vans by 2035.
The measure, originally approved by the European Union’s (EU) 27 member states in October, mandates that car manufacturers in the EU must achieve a 100% cut in carbon emissions for new cars and vans sold by 2035. The legislation also mandates that new cars achieve a 55% cut in carbon emissions after 2030 when compared to 2021 emissions, while new vans must have a 50% cut in emissions.
Parliament has approved the new CO2 emissions reduction targets for new passenger cars and light commercial vehicles as part of the EU’s Fit for 55 package.
— European Parliament (@Europarl_EN) February 14, 2023
The measure also changes preexisting incentives for car manufacturers to have 25% of car sales to be zero-emission and 17% of van sales from 2025 to 2029. The incentives are set to be removed by 2030. The measure further holds that the European Commission will present a methodology for evaluating carbon emissions from cars and vans sold in the EU, as well as begin publishing a biennial report evaluating the block’s progress towards zero-carbon emissions.
Exceptions to the legislation include allowing small automakers who make less than 10,000 new cars or from 1,000 to 22,000 new vans every year to derogate emissions reductions until the start of 2036. Manufacturers that make less then a thousand cars per year are completely exempt.
“This regulation encourages the production of zero- and low-emission vehicles,” said rapporteur Jan Huitema of the Netherlands, EUP’s chief negotiator on rules. “It contains an ambitious revision of the targets for 2030 and a zero-emission target for 2035, which is crucial to reach climate neutrality by 2050.”
Critics of the measure state that it could engineering and manufacturing jobs at risk. They also maintain that both European industry and Europeans are not ready to handle a transition to net-zero emissions, with some parliamentarians noting potential complications in training a workforce and refitting factories to handle the manufacture of electric cars.
The legislation is set to be examined by the European Council. The Council must give its approval of the measure before its text is printed by the EU Official Journal and take effect. The Council is expected to give its approval of the measure next month.
The bloc’s decision mirrors similar moves by U.S. states to phase out traditional cars and trucks in an effort to stall “climate change.”
California became the frontrunner in the movement to retire fossil fuel-reliant vehicles in the U.S in 2020 after Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom directed state officials to ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035, despite the state’s struggles to keep its electric grid functioning thanks to outdated infrastructure and increasing dependency on unreliable “clean energy” sources.
In September, New York Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul similarly ordered the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation “to take major regulatory action that will require all new passenger cars, pickup trucks, and SUVs sold in New York State to be zero emissions by 2035.”
The hard shift to “clean energy” exemplified by moves to forbid future sales of gas-powered cars has been a central plank of the global left-wing climate agenda and a major component of the WEF’s “Great Reset,” which “seeks to ‘push the reset button’ on the global economy” and “reimagine capitalism.”
WEF founder Klaus Schwab has argued that “[e]very country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.”
The WEF has also endorsed the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, which call for the global implementation of a spate of leftist agenda items ranging from “universal access” to “sexual and reproductive health,” and to the “international cooperation aimed at accelerating the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions” by the year 2030.