The European Parliament on February 3 is scheduled to vote on a new
system for testing whether cars breach limits on dangerous nitrogen
oxides (NOx). The plan is in response to the recent scandal involving
German carmaker Volkswagen, which admitted to manipulating emissions
test data.
As reported by the Financial Times, many in the auto industry, as
well as the European Commission and national governments, are urging
MEPs to support the plan. But key legislators have warned that the
blueprint has been so watered down and is so generous to carmakers that
its provisions are in practice illegal.
Philippe Lamberts, joint leader of the assembly’s Green group, told
the Financial Times the credibility of the EU was on the line. “What is
at stake is whether we want to condone not just a licence to cheat but
also a hollowing-out of legislation,” he said.
While the new testing system has been under development for years,
work on it assumed a new urgency after revelations last year that
Volkswagen had used software-based defeat devices to rig NOx tests.
Elzbieta Bienkowska, the commission member responsible for car
industry regulation, has defended the deal, saying it would make a big
contribution to tackling a longstanding problem of cars passing official
tests but breaching permitted NOx limits on the road. She has also
pledged to make aggressive use of a review clause to try to tighten the
rules further.
“Of course I could call for my initial proposal but I would then need
to have support among the member states, and I will not get it,”
Bienkowska said in an interview with the Financial Times last month.
For parliament to reject the deal and force Brussels back to the
drawing board, MEPs would need to vote by an absolute majority, with at
least 376 of parliament’s 751 members backing rejection — an unusually
high bar.
But opponents of the current text secured a boost on February 1 when
the parliament’s legal affairs committee warned that building a large
margin of manoeuvre into the tests would “run counter [to] the aims and
content” of existing EU environmental regulations and so would be
illegal, reported the Financial Times.
http://neurope.eu/article/eu-parliament-to-vote-on-new-emissions-test-rules/