Traffic hell on the M25. Photograph: Dan Chung/Guardian
"Act now or the world we know will be lost for ever," said a Guardian headline across two pages devoted to a digest of the wake-up Stern report on climate change.
Reflecting this new-found urgency, Tony Blair's government is now pressing for a pact with the G8 and five emerging countries on a Kyoto 2 (post-2012) deal to cut carbon emissions by 30% by 2020 and 60% by 2050 via a global trading scheme - to be signed next year or 2008 at the latest.
This zealous haste is laudable but is the goal - and the timeframe - achievable, asks David Gow in Brussels.
Let's take a practical example. The auto industry is part of the transport sector that now accounts for 22% of CO2 emissions but is among the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gases as millions of citizens in emerging countries acquire cars - and people in the developed world continue to eschew alternative modes of transport.
The industry is going to come more and more under siege in the coming weeks and months to "do something" to mitigate its contribution to climate change.
On December 12 the European commission, fed up with the industry's failure so far to hit voluntary targets for cutting CO2 remissions to 140 grammes per kilometre by 2008, will likely propose fresh laws to force even lower emissions (120g) by 2012. Many MEPs, and not just Greens, are already lining up to back Stavros Dimas, the environment commissioner.
But the matter will not end there. First, getting the European Parliament as a whole, let alone the 25 member states, to agree will, according to the typical EU legislative timetable, take several years - and the industry is already flexing its muscles for a showdown on the issue and preparing to use its influence among policy-makers to derail the new law.
Most environmentalists would say that's because car-makers prefer to put profits before commitment but that's not the whole answer.
While a green transport lobby group T&E has produced figures showing even Toyota, the Japanese "zero emissions" company, failing to hit its voluntary targets, the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA) claims to have achieved the interim target ahead of time - 161g in 2004. It says - in a paper released this week - that new fuel-efficient models have saved up to 20 mega-tonnes of CO2 since 1998 when the voluntary target was agreed.
The European-based industry, including General Motors and Ford, is investing a large part of its annual €20bn R&D budget in fuel-efficient solutions such as hybrid engines, hydrogen fuel-cells and flexi-fuel engines (petrol/diesel mixed with bi-fuels such as ethanol).
But the rub is that consumers are not exactly rushing to buy new models embracing these new technologies.
Sure, demand for models emitting 120g or less has pushed sales to 1m but ACEA says demand has fallen below expectations and eco-models have failed to lift off despite heavy marketing spend.
Allied to this is the failure to build the infrastructure for alternative fuels - and the sheer cost of developing fuel-cell technology, say, on a manageable scale for the "normal" car. Consumers also balk at the extra cost of fitting filters to handle the extra particulates generated by fuel-efficient cars, let alone of hybrids.
The industry's answer is green taxation. Bluntly, it wants a harmonised pan-EU system of fiscal penalties for gas-guzzling vehicles and incentives for green technologies and alternative fuels that would genuinely boost demand.
But that's a red rag to a bull for governments such as Britain's which, with others, is holding up a commission scheme to promote registration taxes according to CO2 emissions - as it fears this would open the door to a wider system of harmonised taxes.
The complexity of aligning fiscal regimes, new technologies and changed consumer behaviour suggests that it will take a long haul before this one industry can play its full part in meeting the climate change goals policy-makers - and voters - increasingly endorse.
