A transatlantic coalition of environmental groups today applauded the decision of Europe’s highest court to uphold the EU law to reduce carbon pollution from airplanes. The decision, from the Court of Justice of the European Union, affirms that the EU law is fully compliant with international law.

The Commission has published its long-awaited proposals on reducing noise from cars, vans, buses and lorries, but the vast majority of cars already meet the first stage of the stricter limits, and almost a quarter meet the second stage. T&E says the proposals should have gone ‘farther and faster’, and has called for a third stage in the timetable in order to create an incentive for quieter vehicles.

The battle over how to classify oil extracted from tar sands and shale under the EU’s fuel quality directive has taken an interesting turn, with California’s Air Resources Board writing to the EU climate commissioner telling her not to believe some of the lobbying in favour of tar sands being undertaken by Canada.

The United Nations’ special rapporteur on the right to food has called for an urgent rethink in EU biofuels policy before too much investment is made on the back of unsustainable biofuels targets. His comments come as more evidence emerges that biofuels may be a poor means of tackling climate change.

The IMO’s mandatory efficiency measures for ships, agreed in July, could save ship operators $50 billion a year by 2020.

The ‘Durban Platform’ may become as commonly known as the Kyoto Protocol, following a loose agreement at this month’s Durban climate change summit on a plan to work towards a global climate strategy. The plan is to agree the strategy by 2015 and for it to start in 2020.

The process that will confirm how Europe’s 2020 emissions target for new cars should be reached has begun, with the leaders of Europe’s car makers greeted by a ‘Star Wars’ style protest. The current limit for new cars is 130g of carbon dioxide per kilometre to be achieved by 2015, and Europe has a target of 95 g/km for 2020.

Europe’s climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard is meeting EU environment ministers today to discuss Europe’s plan to force oil companies to clean up transport fuels. The meeting comes amid a long-running lobbying campaign by Canada and the oil industry who are resisting attempts to force dirty sources of oil such as tar sands and coal-to-liquid to be produced in a more sustainable way. Meanwhile, California, America’s largest transport fuel market, gave renewed backing on Friday to its own ‘Low Carbon Fuel Standard’: the world’s first.

After a twenty-year wait, the European Commission has today proposed new standards to cut noise levels from cars, vans, buses and lorries.

A leading American airline is thought to be behind an intensive push by the USA and other governments to prevent international aviation entering the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) in January. Earlier this month, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (Icao) approved a non-binding resolution calling on the EU to rethink emissions trading for flights involving non-EU airlines, while the US House of Representatives passed an ‘EU ETS Prohibition Act 2011’ saying US airlines should not be included. Yet T&E has discovered a former airline lawyer may well be behind these initiatives.

Extreme warnings about the consequences of delaying action to tackle climate change have come from two sources in the last month. The International Energy Agency (IEA) says a global climate deal must be agreed by 2017 if global temperatures are to be kept under control, and an American institute says global warming is happening faster than the most pessimistic scenarios have predicted.

The latest report on trends in European transport trends show the EU is highly unlikely to achieve its target of reducing transport emissions by 60% between 1990 and 2050 through technology alone.

The German government has approved the use of oversized lorries – known as ‘megatrucks’ or ‘gigaliners’ – for a five-year trial. But even if doubts about the decision’s legality are removed, the lorries will effectively be allowed in less than half the country, as some federal states have banned them.

Most modern cars have air conditioning as a standard feature. Such air conditioning needs to be powered, and therefore leads to greater use of fuel per kilometre driven.

Biofuels produced from palm oil grown in tropical peatlands are a significant source of greenhouse gases. This is the finding of a new study done for the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) which, if taken on board by the EU, would disqualify biofuels from palm oil sources from being counted towards the EU’s renewable fuels target.

T&E's Nusa Urbancic writes in today's edition of the Financial Times: The FT accuses the European Union fuel quality directive of being an “attempt to single out Canada’s oil as uniquely dangerous”. Poppycock. To do so would be political insanity, not to mention illegal.

There appears to be a link between US aviation industry lobbyists and recent international political pressure against EU plans to cap aviation emissions according to documents revealed today by Transport & Environment.

Attempts by several airlines to be excluded from the EU’s aviation Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) when it begins in January have suffered a major setback. The advocate general of the European Court of Justice has delivered her opinion on the case, and it rejects all the airlines’ complaints. Although the advocate general’s opinion is not binding on the final ruling, the Court seldom deviates substantially from an advocate general’s view, and this view is very clear.

Petrol and diesel made from tar sands, coal, gas and oil shale will be assigned a different carbon footprint than fuels from conventional oil, if a proposal from the Commission is supported by EU member states. After years of lobbying by Canada and some sections of the oil industry, the Commission has stuck to its original plan to assign different values to fuels dependent on their source. The values are needed as part of EU efforts to reduce the climate impact of fuel production by 6% by 2020.

More than 150 scientists and economists have written to the Commission calling for it to recognise that biofuels production can have indirect impacts on land-use, and for the resulting emissions to be taken into account in assessing which biofuels help in the fight against global warming. The letter comes as one branch of the biofuels industry has broken away from the rest by saying it would support indirect land-use change (Iluc) being a factor in assessing which biofuels will count towards the EU’s renewable energy target and hence qualify for support.