Vehicle emissions from Delhi’s auto rickshaws and other petrol vehicles count for an average of 23% of pollutants in the air. Photograph: DB Pictures/Alamy
The unruly chaos of Delhi’s roads would be unrecognisable without the rickshaws and scooters that zip through India’s capital in their millions, emitting toxic fumes in their wake. But now, ambitious policies aim to give the city’s most recognisable vehicles an environmental makeover.
On Monday, Delhi’s government announced plans to eventually ban petrol scooters, motorbikes and autorickshaws in favour of those running on electricity, in an attempt to bring down dangerously high pollution levels in the city by the end of the decade.
The policies, which will phase out new petrol and gas scooters, trucks and buses in the capital over the next two years, have beIn recent years, transport has been one of the highest contributors to Delhi’s air pollution, which is consistently at levels dangerously high to human health and has become an emergency in the capital, linked totens of thousands of deaths each year.
Scooters and rickshaws – which largely run on petrol and compressed fossil gas – account for more than two-thirds of the tens of millions of vehicles on Delhi’s roads. Under the new policy, India’s capital will now issue new licence plates only to electric small trucks and three-wheelers, known as e-rickshaws, from 2027, and to e-scooters and electric motorbikes from 2028.
The Delhi government said it hoped the move would lead to an electrification of at least 30% of the capital’s vehicle fleet by 2030. “The policy focuses on pure EVs, which offer superior environmental benefits as zero-emission vehicles,” Delhi’s government said in a statement on Monday.
Amit Bhatt, the managing director or the International Council on Clean Transportation, said: “The proposed phaseout of two- and three-wheelers could be a gamechanger in Delhi’s fight against air pollution.”
Emphasising that scooters, rickshaws and trucks accounted for most of the vehicles on Delhi’s roads, Bhatt added that “accelerating their transition to zero-emission vehicles can significantly reduce vehicular emissions, improve public health, and pave the way for a broader transition to zero-emission transport across all vehicle segments”.
The Delhi state government, run by the Bharatiya Janata party, which also governs at national level, had faced significant criticism and numerous protests during the winter after it was accused of doing nothing to tackle the dangerously high pollution levels that lasted for months.
According to the government’s own figures, vehicle emissions count for an average of 23% of pollutants in the air, making it the highest single source of emissions, particularly during the toxic winter months when a thick smog routinely cloaks the city.
E-rickshaws have become an increasingly familiar sight on Delhi’s roads over the past two years, but the lack of charging points has made drivers reluctant to switch over. Under the new policy, the government has pledged to establish more than 30,000 public charging points across the capital.
Vikas Nimesh, an assistant professor at the School of Public Policy at IIT Delhi, also used the phrase “gamechanger”.
He emphasised that the availability of affordable Indian electric vehicles was rapidly expanding, with Delhi already India’s largest market. Nimesh expressed optimism that the new policy would provide impetus for manufacturers to invest in new green technology and “come up with more EV models” to provide greater consumer choice and competition.
News of the policy had yet to reach most of the city’s millions of auto-rickshaw drivers. Sitting in the shade of his rickshaw cab, parked in Delhi’s busy Connaught Place, Rajesh Gopi, 37, said he was sceptical that any real transition could take place in only two years and worried the electric vehicles would not provide the same earnings.
“I have heard that the e-rickshaws need charging a lot and can’t travel as far as we can on gas,” he said. “If I have to wait one or two hours every day for charging, that’s lost income for me that I can’t afford. I also don’t know how to maintain an e-rickshaw or stop the batteries getting stolen.”
However, he conceded that the city’s pollution was unbearable for rickshaw drivers forced to breathe in deadly fumes. “I am not against change and making the air clean, but I hope we are not the ones to pay the price,” said Gopi.
The policy also introduced significant road and vehicle tax exemptions for people buying new electric cars, in an attempt to incentivise drivers to switch over by choice. However, some critics expressed concern that two years was too short a window to phase out new petrol scooters and rickshaws and ensure there was enough consumer choice.
Temperatures on the ocean surface have hit a record high, raising fears of another burst of extreme heat this summer.
On 21 June, temperatures outside the polar regions exceeded the extraordinary highs observed at the same time in 2023 and 2024, the Copernicus Climate Change Service said on Wednesday.
It warned the new peak would probably bring “consequences for weather patterns, global climate and marine ecosystems”, not least because it would coincide with the earliest phases of an El Niño event they forecast to be the strongest in decades.
When the previous ocean record for June was set in 2023, scientists described the trends as “worrying”, “terrifying” and “bonkers” because they were so far outside their expectations. That presaged an El Niño and a period of devastating global heatwaves, floods and storms.
That 2023 record has now been surpassed and much of the world is once again seeing an alarming rise in temperatures. Last month, the UK and many other countries in Europe sweltered amid new heat records while Antarctica experienced unprecedentedly balmy winter conditions.
Although the focus is usually on land temperatures, oceans give a fuller picture of how much the climate is being pushed out of balance by human-caused warming.
Surface temperatures are affected by solar radiation, water currents and the buildup of heat in the depths.
Oceans absorb more than 90% of the excess energy in the Earth system, which is primarily caused by burning fossil fuels, such as oil, coal and gas. That imbalance hit a record 23 zettajoules last year, more than double the average of the previous two decades.
As a result, the oceans are warming at an accelerating rate. In 2020, the amount of heat being added to the oceans was equivalent to about five Hiroshima bombs a second. Last year, it was closer to 11 Hiroshima explosions a second. The UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, has warned “Earth is being pushed beyond its limits”.
Scientists said it was too early to say whether the sea surface heating would prove temporary or even worsen because annual peaks are usually registered in July and August.
But Carlo Buontempo, Copernicus director at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, warned it could indicate the beginning of a new phase, leading, once more, to uncharted territory: “With ocean temperatures at these levels and El Niño on the horizon, we are likely to see more temperature records fall in the coming months.”
Also, you can personally change things too. Get balcony plug-in solar. Get home plug-in batteries. Nag your government until they make them legal. Vote, vote, vote. Stop eating meat, and if that's too hard, stop eating beef and mutton. If you can afford it, when you replace your car, get an EV. Outside the US, their up-front cost is now as low as petrol cars, and their running costs are much lower.
And you won't be spitting into the wind, because the world's biggest carbon-emitter, China, has probably peaked its emissions. Even in Trump's US, though abolishing the incentives to switch to green alternatives has slowed bettrification down, EV sales have started to rise, and most of new generation capacity this year is renewables.
Fossil fuel companies and the Right want us to give up. Don't.
Temperatures in the Antarctic climbed above 15C this month, shattering the previous winter heat record for the usually frozen region and raising concerns about the speed of climate breakdown. [Reminder: since this is the Southern Hemisphere, it is mid-winter now, the equivalent of December in the N.H.]
The new winter peak temperature was logged by the Argentinian Esperanza base on the Trinity peninsula on 6 June amid a protracted heatwave, when the maximum daily temperature exceeded zero degrees for three consecutive weeks.
Scientists said the high of 15.4C broke the previous record set at the same station in 1998 by 2C. “This is absolutely crazy,” said Raúl Cordero, an Ecuadorian climate professor at the University of Groningen. “It is also about 20C above normal for this time of the year. That is a huge anomaly.”
Unusually strong warm winds from the north blew across much of the Antarctic peninsula. One Chilean weather station, Boonen Rivera, registered temperatures of close to 13C, Cordero said.
On King George Island, 100 miles (160km) from Esperanza, researchers said the landscape had changed from mostly white to brown, grey and green after temperatures hit 4.6C on 6 June.
“Last weekend was very strange. The temperatures here went very high so everything outside melted,” said Luis Muñoz, a Chilean glaciologist. “Usually there is 20cm of snow and a lot of ice on the ground at this time.”
Muñoz said he and a colleague, Natalia Mestre, climbed to the 500-metre peak of the nearby Collins glacier last Wednesday and were surprised to find rain melting the ice. “There was a direct impact on the glacier, which should be receiving snow now. It should not be suffering ablation at this time of the year. This is obviously not good for the glacier.”
The Antarctic region is coming under increasing human pressure, directly in the form of resource exploration and tourism and indirectly through the burning of fossil fuels, which is heating the planet.
Scientists warn that some of the region’s biggest glaciers, such as Thwaites and Pine Island, are approaching or may even have passed a tipping point that could push up global sea levels by four metres. Antarctic ice melt has also been found to slow global ocean circulation.
Cordero said a single winter of heatwaves, no matter how amazing, would not by itself make a huge difference to sea levels, but it signified more alarming long-term trends. “This heatwave happened because of extremely strong westerlies,” he said. “This has been happening with increasing frequency since the 1980s, and that is known to be related to climate change.”
We are doing too little to slash emissions. We need to do it as soon as possible, not in 10 or 20 years' time. In almost every country around the world, the combination of wind, solar and batteries is as cheap as or cheaper than coal and much cheaper than gas. EVs, outside the US and Europe, are as cheap as petrol/diesel cars, and obviously much cheaper to run as well. It's a marriage made in heaven: clean electricity to drive your vehicle fleet, and a huge mobile battery resource which helps stabilise the grid. Let's just do it, instead of phaffing around.
The poor and middle pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the very rich pay lawyers – and the ultra-rich pay politicians. It’s not an original remark, but it bears repeating until everyone has heard it. The more money billionaires accumulate, the greater their control of the political system – which means they pay less tax, which means they accumulate more, which means their control intensifies.
They reshape the world to suit their demands. One of the symptoms of the pathology known as “billionaire brain” is an inability to see beyond their own short-term gain. They would sack the planet for a few more stones on the pointless mountain of wealth. And we can see it happening. Last week delivered the biggest news of the year so far, perhaps the biggest news of the century. But partly because billionaires own most of the media, most people never heard it. We might find ourselves committed to a civilisation-ending event before we even learn that such a thing is possible.
The news is that the state of a crucial oceanic circulation system has been reassessed by scientists. Some now believe that, as a result of climate breakdown changing the temperature and salinity of seawater, it is more likely than not to collapse. This system – known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) – delivers heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic. Recent research suggests that if it shuts down, it could cause both a massive drop in average winter temperatures in northern Europe and drastic changes in the Amazon’s water cycles. This could help tip the rainforest into cascading collapse and trigger further disaster.
Amoc’s shutdown is likely also to cause an acceleration of sea level rise on the east coast of the US, threatening cities. It could also raise Antarctic temperatures by roughly 6C (43F) and release a vast pulse of carbon currently stored in the Southern Ocean, accelerating climate catastrophe.
Even when the countervailing effects of generalised global heating are taken into account, a further paper proposes, the net impact in northern Europe would be periods of extreme cold – including events in which temperatures in London fall to -19C, in Edinburgh to -30C and in Oslo to -48C. Sea ice in February would extend as far as Lincolnshire. Our climate would change drastically, with the likelihood of far greater extremes, such as massive winter storms. Rain-fed arable agriculture would become impossible almost everywhere in the UK.
This shift, on any realistic human scale, would be irreversible. Its speed is likely to outrun our ability to adapt. Amoc shutdowns, driven by natural climate variability, have happened before. But not in the era of large-scale human civilisation.
The first paper proposing that Amoc might have an on-state and an off-state was published in 1961. Since then, many studies have confirmed the finding and explored potential triggers and likely implications. Until recently, Amoc collapse caused by human activity fell into the category of a “high impact, low probability” event, devastating if it happens, but unlikely to occur. Research over the past few years prompted a reassessment: it began to look more like a “high impact, high probability” event. Now, in response to last week’s paper, Prof Stefan Rahmstorf – perhaps the world’s leading authority on the subject – says the chances of a shutdown look like “more than 50%”. We could pass the tipping point, he says, “in the middle of this century”.
So why is this not all over the news? Why is it not the top priority for the governments that claim to protect us from harm? Well, in large part because oligarchic power has championed a model of climate impact that bears little relation to reality: that is, they have a hypothesis about how the world works that is completely detached from scientific findings. This model underpins official responses to the climate crisis.
It began with the work of the economist William Nordhaus, who sought to assess the economic effects of global heating. His modelling suggests that a “socially optimal” level of heating is between 3.5C and 4C. Most climate scientists see a temperature rise of this kind as catastrophic. Even 6C of heating, Nordhaus suggests, would cause a loss of just 8.5% of GDP. Climate science suggests it would look more like curtains for civilisation.
As the eminent economists Nicholas Stern, Joseph Stiglitz and Charlotte Taylor have argued, the mild effects Nordhaus forecasts are merely artefacts of the model he has used. For example, his modelling assumes that catastrophic risks do not exist and that climate impacts rise linearly with temperature. There is no climate model that proposes such a trend. Instead, climate science forecasts nonlinear impacts and greatly escalating risk. The likely impacts of high levels of heating include the inundation of major cities, the closure of the human climate niche (the conditions that sustain human life) across large parts of the globe, the collapse of the global food system and cascading regime shifts – that is, abrupt transitions in ecosystems – releasing natural carbon stores, potentially leading to a “hothouse Earth” in which very few survive. Never mind a few points off GDP: there would be no means of measurement and scarcely an economy to measure.
Bizarrely, the modelling also applies discount rates to future people: their lives, it assumes, are worth less than ours. In other words, it has taken a method used to calculate returns to capital and applied it to human beings. As the three economists point out, “it is very difficult to find a justification for this in moral philosophy.” Moreover, climate impacts disproportionately affect the poor – but under the models, their lives are also priced down.
Unsurprisingly, models of this kind, Stern, Stiglitz and Taylor note, have been seized on by “special interests” such as the fossil fuel industry to argue for minimal responses to the climate crisis. And it’s not just the oil companies. Bill Gates, who claims to want to protect the living planet, has given $3.5m (£2.6m) to a junktank run by Bjorn Lomborg, who has built his career on promoting Nordhaus’s model, thus helping to downplay the need for climate action. Nordhaus was awarded the Nobel Memorial prize for economics for his pernicious nonsense – and it is deeply embedded in government decision-making.
A billionaire death cult has its fingers around humanity’s throat. It both causes and downplays our existential crisis. The oligarchs are not just a class enemy but, as they have always been, a societal enemy: a few thousand people can destroy civilisations. It’s the billions v the billionaires, and the stakes could not possibly be higher.
The price of new battery electric cars has fallen below petrol cars in the UK for the first time, according to the car sales website Autotrader, in a significant milestone in Britain’s transition away from fossil fuels.
The average price of a new electric car listed on the website was £42,620, compared with £43,405 for a new petrol model – making the former £785 cheaper based on advertised prices after discounts.
The higher upfront cost of electric vehicles has long been one of the big sticking points preventing some drivers from switching away from cars with polluting petrol and diesel engines towards those with battery motors, which do not emit carbon dioxide directly. Total running costs for electric cars have been lower for some time.
UK battery electric car sales accounted for 22% of new car sales in the first three months of the year, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, a lobby group.
Prices in the UK have been pushed down by the electric car grant brought in last summer, offering up to £3,750 off some models. Carmakers have also been under intense pressure to drop prices to meet electric car targets, known as the zero emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate, and from an influx of Chinese competitors that have been able to undercut traditional brands.
Autotrader is the UK’s biggest automotive marketplace, although it does not cover all transactions across the country. The data suggests that the UK has reached a pivotal moment for decarbonising its road transport, as a cheaper upfront cost and significantly lower running costs combine to make electric cars increasingly attractive to buyers.
Bex Kennett, the head of new car at Autotrader, said: " ...carmakers had been forced into historically high levels of discounting earlier this year” as they tried to increase electric sales. However, their efforts appear to have been aided by the war in Iran, which has caused a rise in petrol and diesel prices.Car sales platforms across Europehave reported large increases in inquiries for electric cars from consumers keen to cut their energy costs.
Gurjeet Grewal, the chief executive of Octopus Electric Vehicles, the car division of the energy company, said the term milestone “gets thrown around a lot, but this really is one. For the first time, EVs are cheaper than petrol cars on upfront cost – removing one of the biggest barriers to switching.
“They’ve long been cheaper to run, and now they’re cheaper to buy, too. Add in growing competition and more choice, and it’s clear the direction of travel: electric is the obvious option for drivers.”
However, the transition to electric cars in the UK still faces some barriers. Households across the country who do not have driveways are reliant on the public charging network, which remains patchy in some areas.
Given the strategic risks revealed by the Iranian war, the government should regard the EV subsidies as money well spent.
In Australia, the BYD ATTO 1, shown below, is comparable in size and performance to the petrol Suzuki Swift, and is roughly the same price (AUD $24,000, which includes a 10% sales tax), without subsidies. An A$3,000 subsidy for EVs costing less than $30,000 would sharply accelerate EV sales in Australia, as it is in the UK.
