trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

Future orientation of the discussion appeared to emphasize short-term impacts over longer temporalperspectives (Figure 5). In substantial proportion of articles, especially in the letters to the editor, thefuture orientation was totally absent. Near future was the most common temporal perspective of thearticles. Editorials seemed to focus also to longer time perspectives.Figure 5.Future orientation in different newspaper sections.4. Discussion and ConclusionsThe car tax reform was considered as an effective policy measure to solve environmental problemscaused by transport by the majority of the newspaper articles. Although there are several drawbacks ofthe reform, e.g. potentially growing car fleet as well as increasing emissions of particles and nitrogenoxides due to growing amount of diesel cars, the reform was prejudged and framed as an effectiveenvironmental policy measure. Especially the editorials promoted the reform, while the letters to theeditor presented more critical views of the effects of the reform.The actual impacts of the reform have been fairly modest. The discussion was focused on unitemissions measured by emissions relative to traveled distance and not on total emissions measureddirectly. When the actual data is looked at, the unit emissions of new cars did decrease significantly afterthe reform, from 179 g/km in 2007 to 150 g/km in 2010 (Ake, 2011). However, due to the economicrecession, the EU-27 average passenger car density grew only from 463 to 473 cars per 1000 inhabitants(2.2%) between 2007 and 2009, whereas in Finland it grew from 487 to 521 (7.0%), respectively,although Finland by no means remained unaffected by the recession (Figure 6). The car traffic volumegrew in Finland by 1% between 2007 and 2009 although the GDP was reduced by 7.4% which isexceptional (FTA, 2011; Statistics Finland, 2011). Total car traffic CO 2 emissions were reduced by 5.0%between 2007 and 2009 (VTT, 2011), but as the economy will recover, the new cars will probably be usedmore in the future.464