Death and Taxes
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Death and Taxes Dear Reader, It is not wise to pick a fight with the Grim Reaper or the tax authorities, be cause it will inevitably end in disaster. In this case it is the combustion engine that has been declared dead. But, con trary to popular opinion, it can and must make a significant contribution to achiev ing our climate targets. All vehicles are taxed according to their CO2 emissions under the WLTP. Although the cycle rep resents larger areas of the real load pro file than the NEDC because of its differ ing proportions, this approach still raises the question of why vehicles are taxed on the basis of a test procedure that can not fully reproduce reality and that re lates only to the CO2 emissions produced during operation using a tank-to-wheel evaluation. This leads to the argument that electric vehicles should be complete ly exempt from taxes, because the taxa tion system takes only local emissions into account. Charging additional duty on fuel makes absolute sense, however painful it may appear at first sight. The ultimate aim of doing this is to give drivers the incen tive to use renewable fuels. But taking CO2 as the basis for this is the wrong approach. It is not about the CO2 content of the fuels, but purely about the ques tion of whether or not they come from fossil sources. Generating one kilowatt hour of electricity in Germany produ ces an average of 401 g of CO2, which makes it only slightly better than diesel (2.6 kg CO2/l with an energy content of 9.7 kWh/l) in terms of total emissions. The proportion of renewable sources is currently higher for electricity than for diesel and this is precisely where blends
come in and can be used to create incen tives. If diesel is blended with higher proportions of renewably produced fuel, the tax on the liquid fuel could be re duced and its market acceptance could be increased. Ideal candidates are sec ond and third generation biofuels and e-fuels manufactured using hydrogen, green electricity and CO2 from the air. This would reduce the proportions of fossil CO2 and help to create a climateneutral circular economy, which would represent a genuine success. An even better solution would be to tax the entire system using a cradle-to-grave or life cycle analysis. But because this would result in taxes being imposed on battery electric vehicles and would pre vent the existing subsidy policy from being retained, it is unlikely to happen.
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