Automobiles and Climate Policy in the Rest of the OECD

Abstract

Over the course of the past decade, there has been a fundamental change in the approach to regulating fuel economy from road vehicles, mainly induced by concerns of human-induced climate change. The number of countries adopting some form of regulation has grown dramatically. Moreover, the form of the standard is starting to shift away from a mass based approach toward a footprint based approach, which will open up additional opportunities to take advantage of lightweighting as a key element of a control strategy. This chapter describes the history and most recent developments (up to the beginning of 2011) on greenhouse gas emission and/or fuel economy standards from non-EU OECD countries around the world, namely in Canada, Japan, South Korea and the United States. Other OECD countries such as Australia and Mexico are also considering the implementation of similar standards. While command and control standards are expected to remain the backbone of control efforts, economic incentives or disincentives including fuel taxes are expected to play an even more important role in the future than they do today.