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An interview with Ola Källenius on Mercedes-Benz’s road to electrification.
Back in 2019 Mercedes-Benz announced that it would go fully electric by 2030 where markets allow, and the brand is rapidly heading towards that goal. Every new platform and powertrain developed by Mercedes starting from 2025 will be electric, with the current set of gas engines designed to last through the next few product life cycles until being phased out.
Even more importantly, according to Mercedes-Benz’s chairman of the board and CEO Ola Källenius, Mercedes will be completely carbon-neutral by 2039, a plan it calls Ambition 2039. This was derived from the Paris Climate Agreement, which aims for the world to be net zero by 2050. I sat down with Källenius at a roundtable in Vienna during the first drive of the new E-Class – still an internal-combustion car, but one with electrified powertrains – to learn more about Mercedes’ decarbonization plans, EV strategy, and overall outlook on the future of the automotive industry.
“Mercedes-Benz is a brand that stands for the promise of a better future, and that better future is fundamentally a zero-emissions business,” says Källenius, adding that the decarbonization goal will happen in just three product life cycles. He also believes that Mercedes could actually hit its decarbonization goal a little early, closer to the start of the 2030s than the end.
It’s not just people inside the company that want this to happen, either. “There’s not a single long investor in Mercedes stock that doesn’t believe the company needs to decarbonize,” Källenius says. “Even if there weren’t regulatory will, we’re at the point where the financial market made up its mind that a sustainable business strategy is the one that is more economically safe.” He adds that even investors with fossil-based revenue streams are heavily investing in new verticals.
Källenius also thinks aggressively pursuing decarbonization will let Mercedes stay nimble. “We already have strategic clarity; we know what the journey and destination is, and it’s zero emissions,” he says. “But during this transformation, which is more than a decade long and it’s difficult to judge exactly when and what will happen, we need tactical flexibility and we have that.” This means that when the industry gets to the point where the new technology unseats the incumbent technology and there is exponential growth, Mercedes needs to be (and already is) in a position where it doesn’t fall behind. Källenius describes Mercedes as being its own venture capitalist, as it’s in control over financing for its transition to EVs.
All of Mercedes’ global assembly plants have already been made powertrain flexible, so a shift to more EV production will be easy, Källenius argues. Mercedes recently transformed its Alabama facility to produce the EQE and EQS SUVs for global consumption, for example.
Also important to decarbonization is the manufacturing process. “The defining challenge of our generation is to take care of the CO2 problem,” says Källenius, “and it has to be from A to Z, all the suppliers, all our operations, the car itself and the car in use. The twin of the CO2 problem is a circular economy. How do we reduce the use of primary materials in the production of goods? It’s an even bigger problem to solve technologically and economically.” For most current car manufacturers the secondary material content – materials that have been used or recycled – is between 20 to 30 percent. Mercedes is targeting 40 percent by 2030. “That might not sound ambitious, but believe me, engineering-wise it’s unbelievably ambitious,” Källenius says.
The idea is to decouple economic growth from resource usage growth, especially when it comes to EV batteries as they are made up of precious materials like lithium, manganese and cobalt. Mercedes is building its own experimental battery recycling and research factory along with some partners, and prototypes have already been developed that can get recycling quotes into “the deep 90 percent” range. It’s also working with German chemical companies to go through every polymer category and figure out recycling options category by category. Källenius says that one day batteries coming back from vehicles will be “the biggest virtual mine in the world.”
You might think it would be hard to get Mercedes’ suppliers and partners on board with the Ambition 2039 plan, but according to Källenius that wasn’t the case. “When we defined Ambition 2039 it only works if all our suppliers go CO2 neutral as well. If you’re not on board with the program, you’re not on board,” says Källenius. “If all things are equal from performance to quality and price, in a competitive bid if one company has a better plan for decarbonization than the other, that could be the kind of thing that tips the scale.”
Once a year Mercedes holds a conference where it invites 500 of its most important suppliers to go over the year’s results and plan for the future, and at the first one in 2019 after announcing Ambition 2039 the company told its suppliers that it expected each one to come up with an equivalent plan. “The reaction back then from some of the more progressive companies was ‘welcome to the club, you are preaching to the choir,’ and for many in the room it was ‘oh shit, these guys are serious,’” remembers Källenius. “Now I would say 90 percent of our suppliers have a plan.”
Some of Mercedes’ steel suppliers are already deep into carbon-free steel production, with the first results to be in production cars in less than two years. One of the companies, the Swedish firms H2GS, should be carbon-free by 2030 thanks to the use of hydroelectric power. As another example, Mercedes is working with an aluminum producer to reduce its carbon footprint by 70 percent. “Ten years ago, pretty much everyone around the table would’ve said ‘that’s not possible, it’s not gonna happen,’” says Källenius. “Now it’s happening.”
Källenius says the two core technologies driving the shift to EVs are the electric drivetrains and the software, and vertical integration is extremely important to both. For instance, Mercedes owns everything about its powertrains all the way down to the battery chemistry.
The vertical integration is tougher when it comes to the digital side of things. Traditionally electronic architectures in cars have been decentralized – when automakers buy an ECU they buy an entire software package along with it, and the car manufacturer then integrates the functionality. “We said we need to control the brain and central nervous system of the car,” says Källenius. Having this much centralized control over the software means updates and improvements can be made much quicker than before.
The new E-Class is the first Mercedes to have the updated MBUX operating system and cloud infrastructure, in which every single line of code has been programmed by Mercedes for the first time.
Like nearly every other carmaker, Mercedes recently announced that its future EVs will use the NACS charge port pioneered by Tesla. NACS will soon become an SAE standard, which Källenius says played into the decision to switch. “We always do what we think is best for the customer in terms of convenience, and the most likely scenario is NACS,” says Källenius. The first NACS-equipped Benzes won’t start coming out until around 2025, and in the meantime the brand will offer an adapter for existing EVs with the CCS charge port.
Automakers have never historically worked on gas station infrastructure, leaving that to energy companies, but in the electric era that is changing too. Accessible fast charging is potentially the largest pain point for EV customers, so more car companies are figuring out their own solutions to help aid the lagging infrastructure. Later this year Mercedes will open its first high-speed charging stations in the US, with 10,000 coming to America, China and Europe by the end of the decade as part of a multi-billion-dollar investment. The switch to NACS will help in the meantime, allowing Mercedes EV drivers to use Tesla’s expansive Supercharger network. “While we’re building our charging infrastructure, why not offer the Mercedes customer access to the 12,000 chargers built by another company,” Källenius says, “it will create more convenience and maybe take away a little bit of doubt for people that are thinking about buying an EV.”
When it comes to passenger cars Källenius says EVs are the clear way forward versus hydrogen or other synthetic fuels, but those solutions could have other uses. Shipping is one of the biggest issues when it comes to decarbonization; for mass-volume models it’s easy enough to build a local factory in China or the U.S., but for a low-volume model like the SL sports car it’s not economically feasible to have multiple production locations. Mercedes is maximizing its use of shipping by rail, especially in countries like Germany where it’s more feasible, and it’s experimenting with using hydrogen for semi trucks. Overseas and air shipping is even tougher to decarbonize, but synthetic fuels could help with that in the future too.
Källenius just celebrated his 30th anniversary at Mercedes, and he says right now is the most exciting time to be in the industry because everything is changing.
“We have to reinvent the original invention.,” he says. “We have got to be Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz again.”
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Let's dive deep into the campaign against the so-called “high-risk” cables.
One of the biggest threats to American offshore wind is a handful of homeowners on the south Jersey shoreline spouting unproven theories about magnetic fields.
Within a year of forming, the activist group “Stop The High-Risk Cables” has galvanized local politicians against the transmission infrastructure being planned for wind turbines off the coast of New Jersey known as the Larrabee Pre-built Infrastructure. The transmission route, which will run a few miles from the beaches of Sea Girt, New Jersey, to a substation nearby, is expected to be a crucial landing zone for power from major offshore wind projects in south Jersey waters, including Atlantic Shores, a joint venture between EDF Renewables and Shell that received final permits from federal regulators last week.
The only problem: while state regulators have been busy planning the route for the transmission and selecting who will build it, opponents have managed to win the war of public opinion. Activists have clearly turned their neighbors against the plan, pushing the mayors of the four boroughs targeted for Pre-Built Infrastructure to come out against the project. And this weekend Jack Ciattarelli – who narrowly lost the race for the governor’s mansion last year and is running again in 2025 – joined activists rallying against the project and is now campaigning on ending the project and cable landings like it.
Since federal regulators control the waters, what this means is, unless Democrats hit the electoral jackpot over the next year, offshore wind in New Jersey could be screwed – even if Kamala Harris wins the White House.
What makes this more dire is, this isn’t any ol’ transmission. For other offshore wind projects like Empire Wind, states have forced developers to design and construct their own transmission landings, creating a somewhat disorganized situation resembling electrical spaghetti. New Jersey’s offshore wind transmission meanwhile has been studied for years and is supposed to minimize development on the shoreline. This means the combat over this cabling could decide the fates of multiple offshore wind projects – and the first major proactive plan to reduce beach-level environmental impacts that stymie offshore wind in the first place.
So I decided to dive deep into the campaign against the so-called “high-risk” cables. After a series of interviews with organizers and a mayor critical of the state’s processes, I’ve been left feeling this relatively small transmission project represents a true test for democracy’s role in climate action. Could a small band of organized individuals be all it takes to hold back decarbonization at the pace scientists say is necessary, no matter how many climate laws are passed?
Sea Girt resident Kimberly Paterson remembers when she first heard about the cables. Someone had left a postcard on her door about the project. Before that, the professional executive leadership trainer had devoted her activism to preserving maritime forests on the beach. Once made aware of the transmission cables though, she and her small coterie of environmentally-conscious neighbors got active.
Paterson said they also started getting looped in with an existing network of activists concerned about offshore wind infrastructure. Those activists included familiar characters to the fight over New Jersey offshore wind development.
People like Mike Dean of Save the East Coast and Cindy Zipf of Clean Ocean Action, who’ve spread theories without evidence about a spate of whale deaths being tied to pile drivers for offshore wind. She says her group’s work is focused on the cables, not offshore wind, despite the close allyship with these other actors. As she simply put it, “There’s a circle of people that you meet.”
“We do like to work with others, and communicate with others, but we’re not officially tied to any of those other groups.”
The group also started canvassing, making signage for homeowners, and holding public events. As calls for action grew, so too did the political focus on the area, as state legislators and members of Congress took up the issue.
“We have created an absolute firestorm here,” Paterson told me. ‘It is unbelievable what we’ve accomplished.”
The group is focused on what they believe to be the health risks of simply being near high-voltage power lines.
To understand their fears, think of an electric current going through a wire. The more current goes through a wire, the higher likelihood of electrical waves emanating from the current’s pathway. That’s where “electro-magnetic fields” come into play. These fields are all around us and even Earth emits them. It’s the result of an excess of energy.
The World Health Organization classifies even low amounts of electromagnetic fields as a possible carcinogen, citing studies around exposure and childhood leukemia rates. But as many environmental and health experts note, studies to date have not really linked cancer occurrences to prolonged exposure to these fields. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management says the electro-magnetic fields created by cables for offshore wind “are well below the
recommended threshold values for human exposure.” So like whales and wind, it’s something to watch out for, but there’s no evidence to date of a danger here.
Nonetheless, seeking to calm any resident’s fears of magnetic fields, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities last week convened their first public hearing within the planned development area.
At the event, numerous officials came and spoke to the project’s safety, including the executive director of the Board. They even played a long explanatory video from a consultant they hired to review the electro-magnetic fields that would come from the cables. The full presentation laid out numerous examples of what they said were similar underground and underwater transmission lines with magnetic emissions that had no discernable impact on public health, including lines in the New Jersey-New York region.
One person moved by the presentation’s efforts on magnetic fields was Mike Mangan, mayor of Manasquan, one of the boroughs that may be selected to host some of the transmission infrastructure. Mangan told me he joined with other mayors to press the state for more transparency on the cables at the behest of concerned constituents. But he didn’t know what the state knew about the magnetic fields.
“I’ll just be candid — I was ignorant on a lot of that,” he acknowledged. Mangan said he still has “a few very serious concerns” but “I think they addressed some of the bigger concerns,” including the magnetic fields.
I’ll admit, I felt the same. So far in The Fight, we’ve chronicled examples where there are at least somewhat reasonable concerns about renewable energy development – stuff like batteries sited in wildfire risk areas and solar farms in imperiled tortoise habitat. But in this case, I watched the entire presentation online and left thinking this was essentially a non-issue.
Yet Paterson says she was unconvinced by the presentation. The projects they’re citing aren’t comparable, she claims. And then she has a laundry list of other complaints about the potential cables.
Hearing her talk about the transmission, you’d think she just doesn’t want this built under any circumstances. So I asked her if, given her allies, the goal is to stop offshore wind. An avid wildlife painter, she says no, and that she’s “very strongly in support of alternative energy.”
Well, okay. Maybe it’s political or partisan then? I asked her who she’s voting for in this year’s presidential election. “I don’t like anyone in the election to be quite honest,” she confessed, self-identifying simply as a “libertarian.” She then added: “I love the idea of Robert F. Kennedy [Jr.] revolutionizing our health-care system. That makes me very excited.”
Last week, Heatmap published a risk index of the top 10 renewable energy projects worth watching for potential cancellation or major blowback to the energy transition.
We listed Atlantic Shores in the top five, primarily citing the project’s current role as a focal point for opponents to offshore wind up and down the Atlantic coastline. Hours after the risk index was published, Atlantic Shores received its final approval from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
Despite that win, we’re leaving the project on the index because the cables have to be built too – and that stands to be a more stressful fight.
It wasn’t supposed to be hard. In 2021, New Jersey passed a law granting the Board of Public Utilities the authority to supersede local governments opposing easements and other permits for offshore wind transmission cables. But that law’s permissibility under the state constitution hasn’t been tested yet, thanks to the cancellation of Orsted’s Ocean Wind project, which was set to be the likeliest battleground over cables before Atlantic Shores.
State officials are expected in the coming weeks to lay out who will actually build the transmission infrastructure and the route it’ll take from Sea Girt to the Larrabee substation. Between the day of that announcement and the completion of construction, a lot can go awry. Donald Trump could win the presidency and, as opponents of offshore wind expect, revisit permitting decisions for projects like Atlantic Shores. Or a Republican like Jack Ciattarelli could win the governor’s mansion, and that person could take any number of steps to undermine the cables like leaving the local control law undefended in state court if it’s challenged.
All this risk to the energy transition, started by a handful of actors with unfounded claims about magnetic fields.
I asked Atlantic Shores for comment on the opposition movement. They did not get back to me.
However, I did hear from the New Jersey Offshore Wind Alliance, a consortium of developers trying to build offshore wind off the state coast. “While we are advocates of civil discourse and engagement from communities, we urge residents to be mindful of prevalent misinformation,” said Paulina O’Connor, executive director of the alliance, in a statement sent to me Tuesday evening.
“By following best practices in environmental science and engineering, such as proper siting, minimizing disruption during construction, and adherence to all state and federal regulations, this infrastructure can be safely and responsibly integrated into our communities and local and regional power grids to provide resilient and reliable power to New Jersey homes,” O’Connor continued.
I also heard from Anjuli Ramos-Busot, executive director of Sierra Club’s New Jersey chapter, who contacted me last night after Atlantic Shores and the offshore wind alliance brought my reporting to their attention.
“Let us be clear, the microwave in your kitchen emits more electromagnetic currents than cables buried deep underground covered by insulation and concrete,” Ramos-Busot said in a statement. “This technology is vetted, goes through rigorous permitting standards, and is safe and responsible for both the environment and local communities.”
Candidly, I’m holding my breath on whether Sierra Club’s words will win over these concerned shore residents.
With consequences that are extremely real.
Maybe Sharpiegate wasn’t so funny after all.
You’ll recall the micro-controversy from 2019, when then-President Donald Trump said that Hurricane Dorian was headed toward Alabama (which it wasn’t), and officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were pressured to back up Trump’s mistake. It culminated in Trump presenting a map in the Oval Office on which someone drew a bubble atop the projected path of the storm so it would stretch into Alabama, apparently with a Sharpie.
At the time it was troubling but comical, a representation of how the cult-like adoration Trump demanded would distort the work of government in idiotic ways. Five years later, with a storm surge of misinformation pouring over the country in response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, it looks more like a harbinger of things to come.
In any crisis, some measure of confusion is inevitable. Rumors spread and misunderstandings proliferate, fed by fear and desperation. The most extravagant varieties of misinformation are often either short-lived or confined to a minority of the population. That has not been true, however, when it comes to Helene, and it looks like Milton will repeat the same pattern. This time, the misinformation is more explicitly partisan than ever before, and it portends a disturbing future in which every natural disaster could become not just a challenging task of rescue and cleanup but a simultaneous fight against falsehoods and conspiracy theories.
It’s not that disasters have never been political; presidents are often judged by how they react (anyone over 40 knows what the phrase “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job” refers to), with politicians discredited or elevated by how they performed and the opposition taking the opportunity to criticize the administration’s competence. But Trump has given that familiar criticism a particularly venomous cast, claiming not just that the disaster response is falling short but that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are intentionally ignoring the victims because of who they are.
Trump has focused in particular on three falsehoods: First, that the federal government is abandoning hurricane victims in areas where there are lots of Republican voters; second, that funds for recovery are unavailable because the Biden administration gave them to undocumented immigrants (“they stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season”); and third, that the $750 distributed immediately to survivors to enable them to obtain food and other basics, known as Serious Needs Assistance, is all the aid anyone will get.
It was like a bat-signal: As soon as Trump set the terms, conservative media and influencers swung into action, repeating Trump’s bogus claims to their audiences. And then things took a strange turn.
To bring a conspiracy theory into the mainstream, you need individuals and outlets who serve as disinformation linkages, connecting the crazier people and ideas to those with legitimacy. In this case, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, played a key role, and she had a message: The weather is being manipulated by a shadowy conspiracy with powerful technologies at its disposal. “Yes they can control the weather,” she posted on X to her 3.7 million followers. “Anyone who says they don’t, or makes fun of this, is lying to you.”
As evidence, Greene and her allies offer the fact that many people have proposed geoengineering as a solution to a warming planet, which in their eyes means it must already be taking place, and that’s why these hurricanes came to the Southeast. And who is “They”? It might be the government, but to many, it’s obviously the Jews.
Antisemitic conspiracy theories around the hurricanes are swirling on the fetid sewer of right-wing hate and misinformation controlled by the world’s richest individual. As the Washington Postreported, “The attacks, which include wild claims that Jewish officials are conspiring to orchestrate the disasters, sabotage the recovery or even seize victims’ property, are being fomented largely on Elon Musk’s X.”
The tide of misinformation can be partly explained by the calendar. “What’s different about this natural disaster is the timing,” says Danielle Lee Tomson of the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington. “We’ve never had such an incredible, devastating natural disaster within weeks of a presidential election that has impacted two swing states,” North Carolina and Georgia. That gives purchase to the claims that there are conspiracies afoot to change the outcome of the election.
In 2024, it may have been inevitable that a disaster would be tied, however implausibly, to the “one narrative to rule them all this election cycle, which is that of non-citizen voting,” Tomson notes.
Disaster makes people search for answers that give order to chaos and suffering. Even answers that describe a world of sinister forces can be weirdly comforting, by assuring their adherents that they are among a select group who understand the reality most people miss. Amidst the chaos, you can grasp onto whatever bizarre belief you choose.
In the future, we might expect that any climate-linked disaster — hurricanes, floods, heat waves, droughts — will become fodder for this kind of misinformation, not just passed around from person to person but driven from the top of the political food chain.
In effect, this is the inverse of the kind of climate misinformation we’re more used to, which goes under the heading of “denial”: denying that temperatures are increasing, or that carbon pollution is a problem, or that human activity drives climate change. Since the occurrence of a hurricane or fire or other observably extreme event can’t be denied, this new kind of misinformation actually posits not just that the effects of climate change are real, but that they’re worse than you realize. It isn’t just that people have lost their lives or their homes due to a disaster, but that the disaster was engineered by sinister forces (including but not limited to the government) to accomplish a nefarious political goal.
So yesterday’s climate denier could become tomorrow’s climate obsessive, seeing in every disaster the hidden hand of the same global conspiracy that is creating all the world’s problems. “Climate change is the new covid,” said Congresswoman Greene; “Ask your government if the weather is manipulated or controlled.” It’s not fake, it’s a plot, one getting worse with each upward tick in global temperatures.
Of course, misinformation comes in a variety of forms — some downplayed Milton as a way of arguing that the elites are trying to frighten you — and even debunkings can be a path to elevated social media clout when so much focus is on these events.
It may be, as Tomson argues, that it takes something like an impending election to turn conspiracy theorizing around disasters up to 11. “We’ve never seen such an opportune moment to repackage disaster for political gain,” she told me. But the effects of climate change will only grow more intense and dramatic, and there will be political actors looking to turn them against their opponents — and frightened people ready to believe the worst.
1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – A new group – Keep Nantucket Wild – is mobilizing opposition to the Vineyard Wind offshore wind project, seeking to capitalize on the recent blade breakage to sever the town of Nantucket’s good neighbor agreement with project developer Avangrid.
2. East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana – One lowkey local election this fall may decide the future of Louisiana’s renewables: the swing seat on the state’s Public Service Commission, which is being vacated this year by a retiring moderate Republican.
3. Logan County, Ohio – Invenergy’s Fountain Point solar project cleared a hurdle with the Ohio Power Siting Board last month. But the 280 megawatt proposal may face a lengthy appeals process, according to Mike Yoder, a county commissioner who had recently served as an ad hoc member of the OPSB.
4. Riverside County, California – The federal government is now taking public comment on a 100+ megawatt solar farm proposed in the California desert in an area demarcated as a priority for energy development.
Here’s some more fights we’re watching closely…
In Maryland, commissioners in eastern Berlin County have rejected a TurningPoint Energy utility-scale solar farm.
In New Jersey, the group Save Long Beach Island filed a notice of intent to sue against the Atlantic Shores offshore wind approvals last week.
In New York, the town of Oyster Bay has extended its battery storage moratorium for six months to block a project proposed by Jupiter Power Company.
In North Dakota, regulators told staff to put together a final order on the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline, though no date or decision has been discussed.
In Oregon, grassroots opposition is mobilizing against a Hanwha Qcells solar manufacturing project.