One green glimmer

Nov 20

There is, it appears, precisely one thing we are prepared to do at a scale commensurate with the climate crisis — buy cool cars.

This year’s UN climate confab is scheduled to be a “global stocktake” and it will surprise absolutely no one that action remains “woefully inadequate.” Global efforts “are failing across the board,” according to a group of the most spreadsheet-savvy folks in the field.

The group is called the Systems Change Lab, a joint effort of Climate Action Tracker, Climate Analytics, NewClimate Institute, ClimateWorks Foundation, the UN Climate Change High-Level Champions, Bezos Earth Fund, and World Resources Institute.

The Excel experts got together to map what needs doing to meet the Paris targets and distilled it all into 42 distinct categories. On 41 of them, the world is “off track.” Half are “well off track,” while six are heading in the wrong direction altogether.

One lonely indicator is on track and headed in the right direction — sales of electric cars.

Climate activists will be quick to remind us that buying more EVs is not a climate panacea. We have to tackle those other 41 categories as well (and maybe even deeper challenges). But it’s worth looking at this one green glimmer on the spreadsheets because EVs are not only popular but have become both a symbol and a heuristic, a kind of mental model illustrating the task of switching from fossil fuels to clean electricity.

And they are proliferating exponentially. Much faster than most people in most Canadian provinces would realize. From “the car of the uber rich to the car of the Uber driver” (a memorable line from journalist Akshat Rathi, host of the podcast Zero). If you lump together pure electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, EVs already account for nearly one-in-five new cars sold around the world.

All reporting produced as part of this project is free to the public and is not behind National Observer's paywall.

Peter Allan

One green glimmer

2 days above 2 degrees

A heat pump in every home