In short: If SUVs were a country, they would rank as the sixth most polluting in the world. And buying an electric version isn't really a good solution either.
The continued global rise in sales of SUVs pushed their climate-heating emissions to almost one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2022, according to a report from the International Energy Agency.
The 330 million sport utility vehicles on the roads produced emissions equivalent to the combined national emissions of the UK and Germany last year.
The vehicles are larger and heavier than regular cars and use on average 20 percent more fuel. The increased number of SUVs in 2022 were responsible for a third of the increase in global oil demand. “Global car markets did not have a good year in 2022, but SUVs were an exception, raising further concerns about their impact on efforts to tackle climate change,” the report authors wrote.
Purchases of SUVs have soared in recent years, rising from 20 percent of new cars in 2012 to 46 percent of all cars last year, the IEA says. The rise continued in 2022, despite the overall number of cars sold globally falling slightly.
About one in six SUVs sold in 2022 were electric. But the IEA experts said: “Electric SUVs are growing in popularity, but not quickly enough to offset the increasing oil consumption and emissions of the wider fleet. Electric SUVs also require larger batteries to power them, so a growing electric SUV market would impose additional pressure on battery supply chains and further increase demand for the critical minerals needed to make the batteries.”
Some experts, like economic historian and degrowth expert Matthias Schmelzer, have called for an outright ban on non-essential SUVs, reports Ecowatch. He pointed to a recent Financial Times article finding that SUVs and light trucks now made up four fifths of U.S. car new sales.
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