Vehicle giant says it’s responsible for 2% of global CO2 emissions

BERLIN: The Volkswagen group alone is responsible for around 2 percent of global carbon emissions — roughly the same amount as Germany — one of the car manufacturer’s senior figures said in an interview.

“We have calculated how much the group represents among global CO2 emissions,” said Michael Jost, Volkswagen’s chief strategist told German business weekly magazine Wirtschaftswoche. “It’s almost one percent for cars and one percent for trucks.” In comparison, Germany accounts for nearly 2.2 percent of C02 emissions, the equivalent of 800 million tonnes, and was ranked 6th globally, according to 2017 figures from the Global Carbon Project. Last week, Herbert Diess, boss of the Volkswagen group, told employees the figure is 1 percent for the million cars the group has produced which are in circulation. “This percentage, we want to reduce to zero by 2050,” he said at company headquarters in Wolfsburg. The German car giant has been struggling to restore its reputation since the 2015 “Dieselgate” scandal, when it admitted to fitting 11 million vehicles worldwide with a device aimed at cheating pollution tests.