How to get to zero emissions by 2035

California’s climate mandate

California will ban the sale of all gas-powered cars in the state by 2035. And while there are still questions about how exactly manufacturers – and their suppliers – can make this work, the mandate could still help transform the future of clean transportation.

The Big Question: Can Automakers Deliver? A growing number of automakers already have plans to electrify many, if not all, of their offerings, including GM, which plans to sell only zero-emission vehicles by 2035. Other automakers are not far behind.

• Incentives for automakers to go electric, including provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, could help make California’s plan a reality.
• But the supply chain could be an issue, said Brian Kahn, editor of Protocol Climate. In order to produce enough EVs and make them affordable, the battery supply chain needs to address the backlog.

• The IRA’s incentives for mining critical minerals might provide some relief. Supply chain diversification through partnerships with countries that are “not developing their critical minerals as far as they could” could also be a solution, Brian said. However, doing so responsibly and ethically presents a challenge.

The mandate is good news for pure electric vehicle companies like Tesla and Rivian. Traditional automakers have the cash and manufacturing capacity to make electric vehicles, and they could well catch up with — and surpass — industry leader Tesla. But they’ll have to strike a balancing act if they continue to sell gas-powered vehicles.

California’s mandate could be historic, and not just because it’s the country’s largest auto market. It’s also a trendsetter when it comes to clean transportation, which Brian said could make this a “world-changing approach to how we think about transportation.” In fact it is has already started to happen.

— Nat Rubio Light

The clown car and the gold mine

Have you heard that Twitter could turn into a podcast app? What, I mean sure, who doesn’t want to be a podcast app? The irony for those of us cursed with long memories is that almost 16 years ago, Twitter was spun out of a podcasting app.

Twitter could never tell what it is. Evan Williams, who originally funded Twitter, and Jack Dorsey, who helped create it, fundamentally disagreed about what they unleashed on the world.

• microblogging? A text-based social network? The Ultimate News Feed? The public marketplace? Safe and secure and safe and secure.
• There is a famous quote attributed to Mark Zuckerberg: “Twitter is a clown car that has fallen into a gold mine.” The gold mine is the potential to capture the real-time pulse of the planet. The clown car is his management, or lack thereof: Before he left, Dorsey was part-time for most of Twitter history when not in exile.
• “[M]My biggest regret is that it became a company,” said Dorsey tweeted yesterday.

Now Dorsey’s successor has narrative problems. Parag Agrawal doesn’t like the stories being told via Twitter: He told employees whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko was creating a “false narrative” about the company.

• It’s easy to feel sympathy for Agrawal. As Mike Masnick points out on Techdirt, Zatko’s complaint actually supports Twitter’s arguments against Elon Musk as it seeks to force him to stick with his deal to buy it.
• But Musk wins in the court of public opinion. The reason Mudge, Musk, and just about anyone with a keyboard are able to spread false stories on Twitter is because Twitter hasn’t told its own story well.

Zuckerberg’s Twitter narrative is the only one that’s really stuck. Now we have a clown car guarding the gold mine. Twitter has a mountain of technical debt, including its security, from being poorly run. However, there is still gold there for foreign spies, crypto scammers, and others to exploit. So we get to this point where Musk is trying to grab the steering wheel. And probably make the clown car self-propelled or send it to Mars. Anything seems better than that.

– Owen Thomas

Accessibility is a never-ending task

For Slack’s Summer Panage, the accessibility work is never finished. “A common challenge for companies is to say, ‘Oh, we’ve made our product accessible. And now it’s done,’” Panage told me. “But that is not the case.”

Panage joined Slack four months ago from Apple, where she worked on accessibility for iOS, and has since helped focus Slack’s accessibility efforts. Here are a few takeaways from our conversation for anyone thinking about accessibility:

• Consider building an accessibility team before scaling: “I think it’s much rarer in the small companies [but] often there are people who care a lot about it… It’s not too common [to have a dedicated team]but it is super beneficial.”
• Establish standards sooner rather than later: “As a company grows, it’s important to establish what the accessibility process looks like pretty early on…so by the time a new team comes in, that process is already there for them.”
• Users often know best: “Listening to our users is critical to making good decisions about the product, and that’s certainly something Slack was already doing before I arrived.”

Read the full interview here.

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