Which economic handles do the politicians have to pull to move people from black to green cars? That is the main question for the GREENCAR research team at the Department of Economics. There are several pitfalls - for some 'green' solutions turn out to be carbon black.
Portrait series: The climate scientists
In a series of portraits, we go behind the diverse climate-related research that takes place at the Faculty of Social Sciences' five departments and many research environments.
The article about the researchers behind the GREENCAR project is the third in the series.
Converting Denmark's car fleet to zero-emission vehicles will take decades and require major tax reforms. The research project GREENCAR aims to provide the necessary quantitative analysis so that politicians can make more informed choices while transitioning the car fleet.
Professor Mogens Fosgerau is leading the project, which has been granted DKK 11.8 million by the Danish Independent Research Foundation.
"Basically, we need to make a calculator that can predict the implications of legislation in the car market," says Mogens Fosgerau and continues:
"Ultimately, we have to calculate how much money one or another tax reform can provide. How many cars end up on the roads, how much CO2 they emit and what does this mean for air pollution."
The GREENCAR project is very much about analyzing the consequences of human behavior - and the need to change behavior for the sake of the climate is a key agenda in 2022. However, Mogens Fosgerau believes that the green transition is often reduced to a question of how to make an effort on an individual level and become a better person. He can see no effect of the moral climate debate.
"I do not know of any major societal transformations in the environmental field or any other area of our society, where one has succeeded in implementing behavioral changes on a larger scale without turning large, economic wheels," points out Mogens Fosgerau.
By economic wheels he means reforms of taxes and duties. Carrot and stick.
"This also applies to a large area such as cars, where a great part of our emissions come from. Here we have really big economic wheels in use: registration tax, fuel tax and green ownership tax - and then we have EU regulation on which cars may be sold at all," mentions Mogens Fosgerau.
The true color of hybrid cars
Today, the models that ministries use to predict the effect of legislative changes in the automotive field are far from up-to-date. The history is also full of examples that it does not always go as intended when politicians pull financial levers to change the Danes' car preferences.
Mogens Fosgerau was a member of the electric car commission, whose recommendations ended up accelerating the hybrid car sales in a crazy pace due to the introduction of low taxes. The hybrid cars have since often turned out to be even blacker than the petrol and diesel cars, because they primarily run on fossil fuels and at the same time are equipped with a battery that has been costly to produce in terms of climate footprint.
"It's easy to be wise in hindsight and say that you could have known that two years ago, but we were not that smart then. Now there are data sources that all point to the hybrid cars being charged much less than they need in order to be green. In fact, hybrid cars can have a negative effect on the climate account, partly because people often prefer larger, cheaper hybrid cars to smaller, more expensive petrol cars," says Mogens Fosgerau.
The explosion in the number of hybrid cars was the starting shot for the GREENCAR project.
In December 2021, the Danish Independent Research Foundation granted DKK 11.8 million for the GREENCAR project, which will contribute to the green transformation of the large, complex car market.
The research team consists of Mogens Fosgerau, Bertel Schjerning, Anders Munk-Nielsen, Nikolaj Nielsen and Maria Juul Hansen.
Specifically, they must develop economic models that indicate how the zero-emission car can take over at the politically decided pace, and what consequences different measures will have for climate as well as congestion, safety and air pollution.
