How to get to zero emissions by 2035

The California Climate Mandate

California will ban all gasoline-powered cars from being sold in the state by 2035. And while questions remain about how exactly manufacturers — and their suppliers — can make this work, the mandate could still help change the future of clean transportation. .

The big question: Can automakers deliver? A growing number of automakers already have plans to electrify much, if not all, of their offerings, including GM, which plans to sell only zero-emission vehicles by 2035. Other automakers aren’t far behind.

• Incentives for automakers to go electric, including provisions in the Reduce Inflation Act, could help make California’s plan a reality.
• But the supply chain could be a problem, Protocol Climate editor Brian Kahn told me. To make enough electric vehicles and make them affordable, the battery supply chain must address delays.

• IRA incentives for mining critical minerals could provide some relief. Diversifying the supply chain by partnering with countries that aren’t “taking advantage of their critical minerals as much as they could” could also be a solution, Brian said. Still, doing this responsibly and ethically presents a challenge.

The mandate is good news for companies that only use electric vehicles like Tesla and Rivian. Traditional automakers have the cash and manufacturing capabilities to make electric vehicles, and are likely to catch up and overtake industry leader Tesla. But they have a balancing act to perform as they continue to sell gasoline-powered vehicles.

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

— Nat Rubio-Licht

The clown car and the gold mine.

Did you hear that Twitter could become a podcast app? Which, I mean, sure, who doesn’t want to be a podcast app? The irony for those of us cursed with memory is that Twitter parted ways with a podcasting app nearly 16 years ago.

Twitter has never been able to say what it is. Evan Williams, who originally financed Twitter, and Jack Dorsey, who helped create it, fundamentally disagreed about what they had unleashed on the world.

• microblogging? A text-based social network? The ultimate news source? The public town square? Safe and safe and safe and secure.
• There is a famous quote attributed to Mark Zuckerberg: “Twitter is a clown car that fell into a gold mine.” The gold mine is the potential to capture the real-time pulse of the planet. The clown car is the management of it or the lack of it: Dorsey, before he left, worked part-time for most of Twitter’s history, when he wasn’t in exile.
• “[M]My biggest regret is that it became a company,” Dorsey tweeted yesterday.

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

• It’s easy to feel a certain sympathy for Agrawal. As Mike Masnick points out in Techdirt, Zatko’s complaint actually supports Twitter’s arguments against Elon Musk, as he tries to force him to honor his deal to buy it.
• But Musk is winning in the court of public opinion. The reason Mudge, Musk, and just about anyone with a keyboard can spout false narratives about 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, because it is poorly managed, has a mountain of technical debt, including its security. However, there is still gold out there for foreign spies, cryptocurrency scammers and others to mine. That’s how we got to this juncture with Musk trying to grab the steering wheel. And, presumably, make the clown car drive itself or send it to Mars. Anything seems better than this.

—Owen Thomas

Accessibility is a never-ending task

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

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

• Consider creating an accessibility team before escalating: “I think it’s much less common in small businesses, [but] there will often be people who care deeply about it… It’s not very common [to have a dedicated team]but it is super beneficial”.
• Set standards sooner rather than later: “As a company grows, one thing that’s important to establish early on is what the accessibility process looks like…so when a new team is formed, that process is already there for them.”
• Users often know best: “Listening to our users is critical to making good product decisions, and that’s certainly something Slack was already doing before I came along.”

Read the full interview here.

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