Battery electric vehicles and climate change
The future
If this investigation of BEVs has genuinely led to the identification of a rulebook for successfully using new technology in the battle against climate change, then we should at least test the application of these rules on further opportunities that may help in the battle to save our planet. In doing so, we should remind ourselves of the specifics of this rulebook which, in summary, tells us that any new technology must:
1.
Offer a path to material impact in the battle against climate change
2.
Deliver and improve on existing customer propositions
3.
Provide manufacturers with clear incentives to drive their adoption
4. 5.
Have a supportive ecosystem and infrastructure
Be backed by government regulation to support all the other rules
Indeed, as we begin to pivot from BEVs to explore other technological solutions, it is only natural to begin with rule one: that all efforts must offer a path to material impact. After all, while vehicle electrification provides the most sizeable benefit within transportation, it still ranks a somewhat lowly #26 in Drawdown’s full set of levers (Hawken, 2018). Such ranking offers an immediate basis for prioritizing and filtering investment, as our attention is thrown quickly to the top of the list – to identify technologies that can help address the solutions required across, in order, refrigeration, onshore wind turbines, food reduction, plant diets, forestry protection, education, family planning, solar energy and silvopasture. Let us test, then, our rulebook on the solutions required for refrigeration. While the 1987 Montreal Protocol banning hydro-chlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) was a tremendously effective example of rule five (regulation) working in support for all other rules, forcing as it did the elimination of ozone- depleting chlorine atoms from new refrigerant manufacturing, it also quickly led to a new challenge: first, the need to dispose of HCFCs and CFCs already in circulation without risk of releasing them into the atmosphere, and second, the need to reduce substitutive HFCs – HCFCs’ replacement – that is, when their calamitous greenhouse warming effects subsequently became clear. In 2016, the Montreal Protocol was amended to also force action on HFCs – again, an example of rule five acting as an energizing kick-start for activity – but even with such regulation, technological solutions are still needed. Businesses, industry-trade bodies and governments are now looking with urgency at substitutive solutions for the world’s vast rang e of refrigerant needs, whether in the global food supply chain (known as the cold-chain logistics industry) or of end-consumers, with growth in low-cost refrigeration and air-conditioning forecast through to 2050. As they do so – examining technologies that can instead draw on alternative HFC-free refrigerants such as carbon dioxide, water, ammonia or air, to name a few, while in parallel reducing cooling systems’ energy consumption through improved efficiency – they will benefit from pursuit of my five rules. With rule one already telling us that addressing refrigeration will have material impact on climate change, rule two still tells us that the manufacturers of refrigerant solutions nevertheless need to meet the needs of customers in the food industry supply chain, and offer low-cost and effective propositions to real-estate businesses and home- owners; rule three tells that the relatively fragmented refrigeration industry needs to be collectively incentivized to invest in the R&D for such solutions; while rule four tells us that the ecosystem must also fall into line – be this in themore straightforward needs for HFC-freemanufacturing, or installation and service solutions, or in the more complicated steps required to drive adoption of new practices in
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