10 Major Industries Ranked By Climate Action Progress
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4 years agoon
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adminThe Climate Crisis team on Quora asked me to assess which industries are ahead and behind in terms of dealing with climate solutions. I’d just finished reading Kahneman’s Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (strongly recommended), so instead of attempting to provide a multifactorial scoring, I decided to go with a ranking mechanism instead.
And so, my list with color commentary of the major industries which are addressing or challenged to deliver or hostile to climate action, from best to worst.
1. Wind Industry
Wind energy is the biggest new source of low-carbon energy on the planet at present. About 140 GW of capacity with an average capacity factor around 40% was commissioned in 2020, 50% of that in China. As electricity is the future of all energy, being the biggest single provider of new low-carbon electricity pretty much puts you on the top of the heap.
Every MWh of wind energy displaces a MWh of fossil fuel energy with its median 750 kg of CO2 emissions, so last year’s 140 GW of capacity turns into annual CO2 emissions reductions of about 350 million tons of avoided CO2 every year for the next 30 years. Wind energy is the current work horse of CO2 avoidance, hence the reason I’ve spent so much time in the space.
Big providers in order are:
- Vestas – Europe
- Siemens Gamesa – Europe
- Goldwind – China
- GE – USA
- Envision – China
Hmmm… Europe and China are kicking butt and taking names here.
Ørsted gets an honorable mention in this too. It used to be an oil and gas major. Then it saw the light. Now it’s dumped the carbon blight entirely, and is the biggest offshore wind deployer in the world. Also European. Go Europe!
2. Solar Industry
Solar is the second biggest source of new low-carbon electricity in the world, about 100 GW in 2020, once again 50% in China. So that’s pretty damned skippy, and represents about 150 million tons of avoided CO2 annually for the next 30 years.
And what are the companies there?
- LONGi Solar – China
- Jinko Solar – China
- JA Solar – China
- Trina Solar – China
- Canadian Solar – China
Yeah, China owns this market. You have to get down to #8 before you find a non-Chinese manufacturer, First Solar from the US.
Which is why there’s this big Sinophobic lobbying push happening in the US and Europe to cast Chinese solar panels as made with coal and slave labor. I wish I was making this up, but WSJ editorials, observation of social media, and a bit of insider knowledge on my part makes it clear to me that this is occurring.
Resist the Sinophobic BS. We have about 3 billion solar panels on the planet right now, and we need a lot more. China is the only scaled manufacturer of solar panels and many other climate action necessities, and is doing a lot better on climate action than western media portrays, especially the right-wing media, so buy Chinese already.

Silicon Carbide, SiC wafer v8.1 OpAmp Chip in Co-fired Alumina Package for High-temperature Application courtesy NASA
After this, the pickings get a bit slimmer, and the ranking gets harder. Nevertheless, I’m going to pick:
3. Electronics
Wait. What? Electronics? Yeah, electronics.
LEDs have caused lighting and video energy consumption to virtually disappear from the radar screen. 75% energy reduction out of the box. Integrated circuits have made virtually every home appliance an energy sipper, not an energy hog. TVs and monitors? Vastly more of them, vastly less energy used.
Our smartphones replace dozens of comparatively high-energy requirement devices from tape recorders to video recorders to landline telephones to printed books to flashlights to newspapers and on and on.
People kvetch about data center energy usage, but it’s absurd how far a kWh of electricity goes in 2021 vs in 1980. Not only is the future of all energy electricity, we’ve become incredibly parsimonious about most of its uses.
Sure there’s pollution and waste. But when it comes to climate change, energy is Satan incarnate, and electronics have vastly reduced how often Satan is hanging around our homes smelling of brimstone and long-chain polymers. The biggest story in overall efficiency is electronics.
4. HVAC — Okay, Heat Pumps
Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning is going through a double revolution. It’s a big honking energy consumer. But it’s shifting more and more to electricity because baseboard heaters and AC are cheap and convenient, and electricity is decarbonizing.
You can’t decarbonize natural gas or oil heat.
But the second revolution is heat pumps. There’s something called the coefficient of performance (COP). It basically says how much heating or cooling you get per unit of energy input. With natural gas or oil, the absolute maximum is a COP of 1. That means 100% of the energy heats the place.
But heat pumps get COPs of 3–5. Wait. That’s 300% to 500% of energy in output as heat or cold! How do we go over unity! Call the Thermodynamics police!
Well, it’s simple. Heat pumps don’t create heat or cold, they pump heat from one place to another. They are air conditioners, but instead of just pumping heat out, they also pump heat in. And they do it with electricity, so as grids decarbonize with wind and solar, heating and cooling of buildings with heat pumps decarbonizes further in lockstep.
And heat pumps and HVAC in general are subject in most major economies to the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol. The who-what? The Montreal Protocol is the ozone layer saver. It replaced really nasty CFCs with HFCs in refrigerators, air conditioners, and aerosol cans globally, patching up the ozone layer as a result. And HFCs are a bit less warming than CFCs, so that was accidentally good. But a bit less warming still means 1300–14,000 times worse than CO2. Whoops.
The Kigali Amendment, which followed the Paris COP21 meeting a few months later, but in Rwanda, started to fix that. Basically, it said signatories had to start replacing high global warming potential (GWP) HFCs with lower GWP HFCs, HFOs, and CO2. Yeah, carbon dioxide. It’s a coolant when used as a refrigerant, which of course climate change deniers make into a stupidity test.
So modern heat pumps get 3–5 times the energy efficiency, their refrigerants don’t create global warming nearly as much, and they get more virtuous as the grids they are on decarbonize. Win, win, win!
5. Ground Transportation
Yeah, Tesla. And others. And 38,000 km of high speed electrified rail in China. And 430,000+ electric buses in China. And 19,000 km of high-speed rail in Europe. And 50% of all EVs being bought in China. Lots of electrified freight transport in Europe.

Electrified rail percentages by European country courtesy EU
And lots of transit, e-bikes, e-scooters, e-unicycles, and the like everywhere in the world.
Lots of good stuff happening in ground transportation from a climate perspective, but still a long way to go.
Après nous, le déluge
So yeah, things are going downhill from here on in the rankings. There are some major industries that are poking around the edges, but not getting there rapidly enough.

Boreal forest near Shovel Point in Tettegouche State Park, along the northern shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota. Image courtesy of Kablammo (public domain) via Wikimedia Commons.
6. Forestry
Here’s the deal. Planting a trillion trees will bridge a couple of decades of human emissions. And leaving them alone will enhance long term soil carbon sequestration. Further, cutting down the mature trees and turning them into durable wood products like furniture and load-bearing beams for construction sequesters that carbon for a long time.
So the forestry industry has a big part to play. But it’s not there yet.
Canada and Scandinavia are leading in engineered wood beam construction, with approvals for 12- and 16-story buildings respectively. Think plywood load-bearing beams instead of reinforced concrete.
Canada certainly has a lot of newly planted forests. And a bunch of clear cut ones too. I’ve sat in a clear cut on the way to Tofino, shaken to my core. It’s ugly. And I’ve personally pushed 12,000 seedlings into the ground while being towed on a planting trailer behind a tractor in a single weekend. Much more uplifting.
But they are working on it. Seedling planting by drones is a thing now, although survival rates are currently low. Having met a lot of tree planters, I’m pretty sure that the machines will outperform them eventually, if they aren’t already.
China has planted an area larger than the size of France with more than 40 billion trees since 1990.
Has that sunk in yet?
I’ll repeat it nonetheless. China has planted an area larger than the size of France with more than 40 billion trees since 1990.
That’s the forestry industry in action. Unfortunately, the rest of the world isn’t doing nearly as well as China, and to be clear, China deforested all of that first.
7. Agriculture
There’s a lot of ugly and a lot of good in agribusiness.
The land actually under cultivation has barely changed since 1950. We’re feeding vastly more people with the same land area. And the amount of ammonia-nitrogen fertilizer has barely changed since 1950 either.
The population has tripled, but we are feeding them with close to the same land area and close to the same amount of fertilizer. Holy FSM (which I guess would be cannoli)!
Yeah, agribusiness has been totally rocking. Same inputs, massively more outputs.
But still. Agriculture is a big producer of greenhouse gases. And 40% of the total land mass of the world is used for agriculture. That land used to be a carbon sink, but now it’s a carbon emitter.
And ammonia-nitrogen fertilizer sucks from a GHG perspective. The ammonia is made from fossil-fuel derived hydrogen. The fertilizer turns into nitrous oxides with high GWPs. Something like 8x the mass of CO2 is release per pound of fertilizers. Agriculture is in the range of 8–10% of total global GHG emissions annually.
That circle is not yet squared.
However, things are changing, and pretty quickly. Agribusiness is not a conservative, slow moving industry. You don’t triple outputs and maintain inputs since 1950 without being quick to adopt innovations. And now there are three innovations pushing through the global agribusiness world.
The first is precision agriculture. GPS guided, computer-controlled dispensation of seeds, pesticides, water, and fertilizer in precise amounts as needed. Electronics again.
The second is low-tillage agriculture. Leaving the sub-surface soil alone keeps the CO2 in the root system in place longer. And leaving it in place and not disrupting the fungal soil network gives time for the glomalin protein pathway for long term soil carbon capture to work.
The third is biogenetics. Multiple firms are working on making agriculture crops and their biomes more efficient and effective. I spent 90 minutes recently with Karsten Temme, the PhD CEO of PivotBio, which genetically engineers nitrogen-fixing microbes and then brews them in beer vats to spread on fields. 20–25% fertilizer use reduction for 6–7% crop yield improvements. That’s pretty big. And its goal is 100% fertilizer reduction by 2030. (Podcast coming shortly).
Massively more efficient since 1950. And massively less CO2 emissions coming.
8. Air Transportation
Because so much of air travel is international, dealing with emissions is assigned not to flow down targets to countries, but to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). It’s supposed to be acting to bring global carriers to reduced and zero emissions, but it’s incredibly slow and toothless.
To be clear, low-carbon bio- and synthetic jet fuels have been certified for use in aviation since at least 2011, but outside of a few demonstration efforts, aren’t used.
In part, this is because aviation is a hard target, not a soft one. Planes fly by throwing massive amounts of energy to get and keep high speed air flowing under a lifting surface. Doing that for up to 15 hours (my personal longest flight) is staggering.
But there is hope there. I’ll be speaking with the CEO of Heart Aerospace sometime this month or early next. The company has orders for a 19-seat regional electric plane and reasonable funding on its current round. All of the major aerospace manufacturers are looking at electric and electric hybrid. There’s even ZeroAvia, a hydrogen drivetrain startup that Gates’ Breakthrough Ventures is invested in.
We are a long way from having solved this knotty problem, but there is at least work being done.

Image credit: Maersk
9. Water Freight Shipping
We’re already seeing some short haul freight shipping electrifying, and ferries and the like are electrifying rapidly. It’s the medium and long haul shipping which remain untouched.
And they typically run on bunker oil, which is to say one of a hundred different variants of barely refined petroleum products that are below diesel and barely above crude oil. It’s nasty stuff and heavily polluting in addition to its CO2 emissions. As Mark Z. Jacobson points out, they emit a lot of unburned hydrocarbons and soot, black carbon, which has a very high global warming potential.
I spent an hour recently talking with a PhD mechanical engineer who has spent the last four years of his career designing, constructing, installing and certifying the scrubbers that go on these vessels to reduce particulate and chemical emissions down to barely tolerable levels that among other things, pass the visual test with seemingly harmless white smoke coming out of the stacks. Non-trivial and does nothing for the CO2.
Long haul oceanic shipping is one of the only modes of transportation where I consider hydrogen drivetrains to have an actual play.
But oceanic shipping is the worst of the worst of the problems. It’s all under flags of convenience, it’s usually in international waters and it’s a low-margin, competitive business.

DOW CHEMICAL PLANT ON FAR SIDE OF LAKE MICHIGAN
DOCUMERICA: The Environmental Protection Agency’s Program to Photographically Document Subjects of Environmental Concern, 1972 – 1977
Record Group 412: Records of the Environmental Protection Agency, 1944 – 2006
10. Industrial Processes
Industrial processes like cement, steel, and the Solvay process are way behind. They are poking around the edges so far, and there are enormous amounts of industrial commodities being produced in high-carbon approaches. There are bright spots of innovation that have no penetration, like renewably-powered green hydrogen reduction of iron ore into steel foam, and electrochemistry processes that displace the Solvay process for carbonates (look for the CleanTechnica three-part series publishing Aug 14/15 featuring Agora Energy Technologies which covers this). But these are early days. Lots of work to do there.
And then, ugliness ensues.
Oil and gas. Coal. The fossil fuel industry is greenwashing hard and despite its claims, is massively failing to address the most pressing concern of the 21st Century.
Ørsted was mentioned earlier. They got it: oil and gas are destructive coming and going. And they got out. Now they are productive members of society.
The rest of the companies that are still standing after the bloodbath of bankruptcies and mergers of the past decade? Nothingburgers.
Carving off molecule-thin shavings of their emissions to do enhanced oil recovery, push ‘blue’ hydrogen, and promoting it into some vague semblance of green, while lobbying hard with politicians they fund to make it seem like a solution, instead of a continuation of the problem.
Much of industry is responding well to the biggest issue of this century, one we’ve jointly created over the past 300 years. But there is still much work to be done.
And that work requires strong governmental pressure through regulations, carbon taxes and active elimination of the worst emitters. There are elections coming in three major western emitting countries in the next 18 months which will be key: Canada (snap election for Sept 2021, per sources), the US 2022 mid terms, and the Australian federal election. If you aren’t already working in your country to ensure governments focused on climate action are elected, today is the best time to start.

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Environment
E-quipment highlight: Greenworks 60V cordless electric chainsaw
Published
5 hours agoon
September 15, 2025By
admin

Greenworks’ latest 60V cordless chainsaw delivers performance that rivals many gas models, but without the harmful emissions or annoying pull cord. Whether dropping saplings, pruning thick limbs, or clearing up trails after a storm, this battery-powered tool is ready to work.
First released at last year’s CES show in Las Vegas, Greenworks’ 60V li-ion battery packs enough power for 100 clean cuts of the saw’s 16″ blade, and its lightweight, 12.5 lb. frame, tool-less chain tensioner, and automatic oiling system come together for convenient maintenance and easy-to-control power.
When it’s time to get to work, the chainsaw’s brushless electric motor can spin the chain at more than 10,000 rpm with (the company claims) about 20% more torque than a 42cc gas chainsaw for fast, confident cuts through hard woods while keeping noise and vibration to a minimum.
That low-noise and fume-free operation makes Greenworks’ chainsaws an upgrade for both the operator and the neighborhood.
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Greenworks’ 60- and 80-volt batteries aren’t just for chainsaws, either. Greenworks’ batteries can power more than 75 indoor and outdoor products – including hedge trimmers, leaf blowers, even riding lawn mowers, and the STEALTH fat-tire electric mini-motorcycle that made its debut earlier this year.
“Greenworks is proud to offer comprehensive battery-powered solutions for everyone, from homeowners and outdoor enthusiasts to major commercial landscaping contractors,” Klaus Hahn, Greenworks’ President, explained at its launch. “These innovations further our company’s vision of building a more powerful future with clean energy, and they illustrate our tagline ‘Life. Powered. By Greenworks.’”
Greenworks 60V chainsaw specs



- up to 100 cuts on a single charge with the included 2.5Ah battery on 4×4 wood
- 20% more torque and faster cutting than a 42cc gas chainsaw
- no prime, no choke, no pull with no aggravating pull cord
- 2.0 kW (2.7 hp) max output
- brushless motor provides more power, longer run-times, and extended life
The Greenworks 60V 16″ brushless cordless chainsaw, a 2.5Ah battery, and charger are available online for $299.99 – but it’s on sale for “just” $189.99 (or $192.49, with the 18″ arm) on Amazon through September 18th.
If you needed another reason to check it out, the company claims using the electric chainsaw instead of a gas unit saves as much carbon emissions as driving 11,000 miles.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Greenworks, via 9to5Toys.

If you’re considering going solar, it’s always a good idea to get quotes from a few installers. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
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Environment
107 global partners back XCMG push to electrify the mining industry
Published
10 hours agoon
September 14, 2025By
admin

Heavy mineral and metals mining is one of the dirtiest industries on the planet, but Chinese equipment giant XCMG doesn’t think it has to stay that way. To prove it, the company has unveiled a sweeping pledge to electrify and decarbonize mining — and they’re dragging over 100 global partners with them.
Along with with 107 global industry partners from 26 countries, Chinese equipment brand XCMG has issued a Joint Declaration on Global Zero-Carbon Smart Mining, aiming to electrify, automate, and otherwise decarbonize international mining. The pledge addresses 12 key areas including electrification, autonomous operation, net-zero emissions, circular economy, technology sharing, international cooperation, and smarter maintenance strategies.
“As a global leader in zero-carbon smart mining solutions, XCMG is committed to addressing industry bottlenecks through integrating new energy equipment, intelligent control systems and full-lifecycle services,” said Yang Dongsheng, chairman of XCMG Group. “We have resolved the four core challenges of energy infrastructure, new energy equipment portfolios, smart mining management systems and financial support, aiming to help our customers achieving both business growth and environmental wins.”
It’s always great to see efforts like this to decarbonize. But those efforts mean millions of new equipment assets to replace the millions of existing diesel assets deployed currently.
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As luck would have it, XCMG is perfectly positioned to offer those zero-emissions equipment assets. The company says it has, “the complete mining equipment solutions for open-pit and underground mines, as well as its smart construction ecosystem.”
XCMG will sell you the future, today

Multinational mining companies like Fortescue are saving up to $400 million per year on fuel costs alone with the few assets its electrified (or repowered) already, there are more than environmental reasons to push for a coalition like this — especially if you’re XCMG, whose BYD-developed battery swap technology puts them a step or three ahead of even the excellent equipment options from Volvo CE.
With a strong hand in the autonomous haul truck race and ultra-competitive pricing to back their electric plays, it seems like XCMG is about to get serious as it expands its reach into the Western world. It’s no wonder the legacy brands are running scared and hiding behind the bogus “messy middle” propaganda!
SOURCE | IMAGES: XCMG, via Construction Briefing.

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Environment
Europe rebuffs automakers’ pleas to let them lose the EV race to China
Published
13 hours agoon
September 14, 2025By
admin

European automakers asked the EU Commission to review and potentially modify the bloc’s 2035 all-EV target at an auto summit on Friday, but the commission is reportedly standing firm despite the industry’s big push this week for more leniency.
In 2021, Europe announced a target to go all-electric by 2035. It was part of a greater package of climate reforms designed to target a 55% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030 and full climate neutrality by 2050.
But a lot has changed since then. European EV sales and market share have continued to rise, but even more importantly, Chinese EV sales have accelerated rapidly… much faster than those in Europe. In 2020, Europe had 11% plug-in (BEV + PHEV) market share and China was at 5%; but in the interim, China leapfrogged Europe by hitting 47% plug-in share in 2024, while Europe only reached 24%. BEV-only numbers are lower, but BEVs still outsell PHEVs significantly.
This has been accompanied by a significant rise in Chinese EV exports as well. As China’s EV manufacturing effort ramps up rapidly due to forward-looking industrial strategy and encouragement of EV startups, the country has started to produce advanced EVs so cheaply that slow-moving Western automakers are finding it hard to compete (after putting in little effort to do so).
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And so, what are the automakers to do? They’ve already tried nothing, and they’re all out of ideas. So they’re doing what they usually do: going to the teacher to beg for an extension.
Automakers make a final push for leniency on EU emissions
Friday’s auto summit was reportedly the third and last “crisis meeting” between automakers and the EU Commission, timed at the end of the largest European auto show, IAA Munich. Automakers and some governments spent the week agitating for leniency on CO2 targets and to extend the life of the internal combustion engine.
The EU reportedly agreed to an early review of its 2035 targets, but otherwise stood firm, stating that “no matter what, the future of cars is electric.” The reforms included a mechanism by which the EU could review its progress towards its targets, with the review set to happen in 2026, but that review will reportedly now happen this year.
The argument is that automakers don’t have enough time to get up to 100% EV sales by 2035, having only advanced from 11%->24% between 2020 and 2024. But despite automakers’ protestations, China’s move from 5%->47% in the same time frame shows that a lot more is possible than European automakers are letting on.
The review comes after Europe already loosened rules for automakers earlier this year. In March, the Commission gave automakers “breathing room,” slightly extending the deadline for emissions compliance for the 2025-2027 model years (which they now seem on track to meet).
Ironically, this “breathing room” for automakers would result in less “breathing room” for actual humans with lungs, who will have to breathe more pollution as a result of the automakers’ inability to stop poisoning everyone.
Despite that Europe is reportedly standing firm on its targets, it may offer some minor flexibility in its review.
What form the reviewed targets might take is not yet clear. But some automakers and government entities like Germany’s CDU (whose leader, Friedrich Merz, said the auto industry should “not limit itself to a single solution”) are asking for “solutions” that still rely on combustion, and extend the lifespan of polluting, complex and wasteful gasoline engines.
Automakers want clean fuels which… aren’t actually clean
EU President Ursula Von der Leyen reportedly says that the EU will hold firm, but did not rule out potential exceptions for plug-in hybrid vehicles with primarily use electricity but have a combustion engine as a fallback.
However, allowing plug-in hybrids would be folly, given research released just this week from Transport & Environment showing plug-in hybrids emit five times as many emissions on average in the real-world as they do in testing regimes.
Another common request made by automakers has involved “biofuels” or “e-fuels,” clean-sounding names for something that is still inherently wasteful. The EU has already made an exception for these fuels in its 2035 rules.
While synthetic “e-fuels” created from renewable electricity are principally carbon-free and are obviously better than fossil-based fuels, internal combustion engines are still desperately inefficient, with 20-30% efficiency, as compared to ~90% efficiency for electric motors. Putting that electricity directly into a BEV is a far more efficient way to convert electricity to motion than using the electricity to create synthetic fuels, then shipping and inefficiently combusting those fuels.
For biofuels, which are also carbon neutral, the land and water required is an order of magnitude larger than what’s needed for renewable electricity sources used to fuel electric vehicles. In order to fuel all the world’s cars with biofuels, we would need about twice as much land and rainfall as is available on Earth.
And while it’s nice to think that all these combustion engines might suddenly convert to using biofuels, that seems unlikely to happen. So, continuing to build these engines means they will continue to combust things that, mathematically, must remain underground and uncombusted.
Meanwhile, climate change continues to accelerate as human emissions continue to rise. This is the largest and objectively the most important challenge that humanity has ever created for itself, and one that Europe needs to confront boldly.
Finally, one auto CEO speaks the truth
Thankfully, somebody pointed out the ridiculousness of this debate.
Audi CEO Gernot Döllner said this week that the constant bickering and begging by the auto industry is “counterproductive.”
“I don’t know of any better technology than the electric car for advancing CO2 reduction in transportation in the coming years. But even apart from climate protection, the electric car is simply the better technology,” said Döllner, who said that the constant debates over whether inferior combustion engines should be preserved are “counterproductive and unsettle customers.”
Meanwhile, Mercedes CEO Ola Källenius, who also heads the European Automobile Manufacturer’s Association (ACEA), went exactly in the wrong direction with his comments, saying that “hybrids and efficient high-tech combustion engines should remain part of the way forward, otherwise we risk acceptance and jobs.”
The actual reality of the situation is that Europe will lose jobs if it fails on the EV transition… which it already is, and will fail even harder with the complacency that Källenius and Merz have asked for. Doubling down on combustion will result in failure in the face of superior competition from overseas.
At least one CEO, Döllner, actually seems to get it. Although, he did become CEO shortly before Audi tamped down on its EV push, so maybe he needs to listen to his own words.
An unnamed European official, quoted by Euronews, also injected some reality into the situation. After Friday’s talks, the person said “even if the Commission took down these targets, global competition would set them for the industry,” recognizing that superior Chinese EVs are already out-competing European brands and that competition may result in change regardless of any futzing about the automakers beg the EU to do.
A retreat would surrender to Chinese competition
The current situation in Europe involves rising competition from the aforementioned Chinese EV exports. While Chinese share of European EV sales is still rather low at around 11%, that share has been growing rapidly. And it’s growing because, despite the tariff Europe levies on Chinese EVs, these cars still offer quite a good value proposition, and some have better software features than those available from slower-moving traditional automakers.
This is one thing that has European automakers scared about the EV transition. But instead of recognizing that they are behind and need to catch up, they are falling back to the default mode for large businesses – begging government to slow things down so that they can maintain their dominant position. But that hasn’t worked before, and it won’t work now, and thankfully Europe seems not to be taking the bait.
The only way that European automakers can confront the rising challenge from Chinese EVs, and work to solve climate change which their products are the largest single cause of, and which the transportation industry specifically is not doing enough to fix, is by committing more seriously to the EV transition, not by begging the government to let them move more slowly.
Notably, the same sort of begging is not happening in China. When new regulations threatened to destroy the market for ICE cars in China and leave millions of cars unsellable, Chinese auto dealers did ask for a reprieve… but only for six months, in order to sell off existing inventory, while also calling on all levels of industry and government to take the EV transition more seriously, rather than asking anyone to pump the brakes on it.
And none of these Chinese EVs are having any trouble with emissions limits, either. They are not poisoning the lungs (and every other organ) of Europeans – that’s being done by the combustion engine makers.
The only answer is to accelerate, not decelerate
All the above said, Europe’s target probably should be reviewed… because 2035 is not early enough. The faster we work to confront climate change, the better. No matter how expensive it seems it might be to solve the problem that we collectively have spent the last century and a half causing (and have supercharged in the last 30 years), that cost will only get higher as time goes on and as more damage is done.
Many studies have pointed out that the faster we solve this problem, the cheaper it will be to fix, so every moment lost as a result of the auto industry begging for more time only represents more cost, death, and disruption for humanity and for all species on Earth.
Lobbying to slow down the transition therefore does not just harm European industry, but also would harm all life on Earth. And, as Audi’s CEO pointed out, debate over the simple truth of electric drive’s superiority is counterproductive. The European Commission is right to hold firm on its targets, and should rebuff any further pleas to weaken them from the auto industry, the very industry that got itself, and all of us, into this problem in the first place.
The 30% federal solar tax credit is ending this year. If you’ve ever considered going solar, now’s the time to act. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
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