The Lack of a European Environmental Conscience? The Impact of Dieselgate on the EU’s Energy Transition

The Dieselgate scandal has shown the lack of a European environmental conscience concerning reducing emission from road vehicles and thus reducing air pollution. However, several European countries intend to ban the sale of fossil fuel vehicles from 2030. This puts pressure on the car industry to develop technologies, which can accommodate demand for batteries with long-range mileage. The transition to electrical vehicles will increase electricity demands, thereby affecting EU climate and renewable energy targets and energy production. The shift away from the combustion engine to battery driven vehicles influence job skills, thereby challenging the status quo in car manufacturing. Thus, transition to electrical cars influences EU transport, industrial, climate and energy policies. A successful transition to a low carbon economy requires closer cooperation between these policies and sectors. Yet, these policies represent different political agendas, which begs the question how they influence the transition to decarbonised road transport and a low carbon economy. The car industry’s resistance towards change has dominated EU road transport policy frame. Yet, the dieselgate scandal has been a catalyst for breaking the discursive powers of the car industry and other ideas regarding transport decarbonisation are now challenging the previous discourse. This shift in road transport discourse is part of wider discourses on energy transition and climate change. This paper uses discourse institutionalism to analyse the fallout from dieselgate and its impact on EU political agendas concerning energy transition and mobility. Here ideas represent both policy problems and policy solutions. Whilst there might a consensus of the policy problem, i.e. the need to decarbonise the transport sectors, there are multiple policy solutions to how decarbonisation can occur. The competing ideas can lead to a reframing of existing policies, leading to institutional change or the existing paradigm might continue to be dominant and prevent policy change, which will have consequences for achieving an energy transition. In general, ideas aim to become dominant and institutionalised within EU and national policy-making leading to policy change. In other words, this paper analyses EU transport policy discourses in relation to discourses on energy and climate policy. The sectoral policies all exist within a broader context of energy transition, yet their individual policy frames might be incompatible with developing more policy coherence with regards to achieving a successful energy transition. Overall, the paper identifies how different political policy ideas influence the shift towards decarbonisation of road transport and which agenda is gaining hegemony. In short, the paper analyses the discourses surrounding decarbonisation and its impact on EU’s 2050 energy transition and to what extent there is more policy integration between transport and energy sectors.