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Toyota and Honda never really believed in EVs. Then China gave them a wake-up call.
An entire nation’s automotive industry may have misjudged the moment. Environmental issues are forcing changes it doesn’t seem ready for. New competitors boasting more efficient technologies have led some observers to wonder if it will survive at all.
Am I talking about America’s automotive industry during the infamous 1970s Malaise Era, or the Japanese auto industry in the 2020s? In the growing arms race around battery-electric vehicles, Japan’s automakers may have some serious catching up to do.
On a lot of levels, comparing the Toyota of today to, say, Ford in 1977 is rather unfair. After all, automakers like Toyota, Honda, Mazda, Subaru and the rest — though hammered by the pandemic and the chip shortage — continue to be handsomely profitable and still produce high-quality, reliable, and fuel-efficient traditional cars and hybrids. It’s hard to start a Death Watch for a company like Toyota when it sold more than 10 million cars globally last year.
But buyers who are loyal to Japanese brands and want to break up with gasoline entirely are better served by Tesla, Ford, Chevrolet, or Hyundai.
Nissan, an early pioneer in the EV world with the soon-to-be-discontinued Leaf, offers just one electric crossover and its production is already flagging. Mazda’s sole battery electric vehicle, the MX-30, only has about 100 miles of range and is only sold in California, as if it were a compliance car from a decade ago. Toyota has one battery-electric vehicle it co-developed with Subaru and also sells as a Lexus. All three versions suffer from middling range, subpar tech, and a lack of fast-charing power like many rivals; two were also recalled last year because their wheels were falling off. (It doesn’t, to paraphrase a TV show from my youth, smack of effort.) Then there’s Honda, which has just one fully electric SUV coming out next year called the Prologue — and under the skin, it’s actually one of General Motors’ EVs.
It’s an unfathomable outcome for the Japanese auto industry. Not that long ago, Japan Inc. was teaching the rest of the world how to efficiently and reliably make cars; Honda was making engines for GM, not the other way around. Now, even Toyota, the creator of the Prius and godfather of the original hybrid car, is being called out by environmental activist groups.
Things do seem to be changing rapidly. Several Japanese automakers are planning multibillion-dollar battery plants now, including in the U.S.; Honda is doing one in Ohio, Nissan in Tennessee, and Toyota in North Carolina. All of them, including tiny, independent Mazda, are planning big expansions of their all-electric lineups.
Toyota, in particular, has signaled under its new CEO that it’s deadly serious about EVs. Earlier this month the automaker announced what it calls “New Technology That Will Change the Future of Cars”: a significant revamping of its manufacturing processes to cut EV costs; a third of its global sales to be electric by 2030; newer, cheaper kinds of batteries; and ultimately, solid-state batteries — a kind of holy-grail technology being sought by countless companies — that could enable 900 miles of electric driving.
But it’s worth asking how these companies got relegated to “EV laggard” status, and the answer is complicated. In talking to countless people in and around the auto industry, I’ve come to the conclusion that Japan’s predicament has to do with perception as much as it does with conditions on the ground. And it speaks to the question of whether the future of cars will really — or should be — be fully battery-powered, and if so, how long it will take to get there.
But given how heavily the car market is trending toward battery EVs right now, Japan’s automakers may not have a choice but to meet the moment.
As global as car companies are, they’re often still rooted in their cultures and values at the home office. And Japan has plenty of reasons to be skeptical of battery EVs.
As a country, it’s poor in natural resources, making the raw materials key to EV batteries tough to obtain. Japan’s densely populated cities make car ownership generally undesirable, let alone ones that need to be charged somewhere. And the 2011 Fukushima disaster led to a decline in electricity from nuclear power plants. Japan made up the gap using fossil fuels, leading to a belief that fully battery-powered cars wouldn’t be as “green” as fuel-sipping hybrids since they relied on a dirty energy grid.
That local backdrop helps explain why Toyota, usually the world’s largest or second-largest automaker, has tilted so heavily toward hybrid evangelism. Over the past few years, it’s turned much of its car lineup into hybrids, even its latest pickup trucks — a stratospheric reduction in carbon emissions, which the company deserves credit for. It argues that it takes fewer scarce minerals to build smaller batteries for hybrids than full EVs.
And Toyota says that it operates globally, with cars tailored to different regions’ needs; it’s a lot easier to fully electrify the cars in a country like Norway than it is in parts of Africa, where Toyota is a top-seller.
Finally, Toyota has spent several decades leading the charge for hydrogen as a power source for cars — both for fuel-cell EVs and as a zero-carbon liquid fuel for internal combustion. But right now, Toyota sells just one hydrogen fuel-cell car in America and only a handful of fueling stations exist on this continent. I’ve heard from those in the know that Toyota viewed hydrogen as a kind of 100-year project; the first in a long-term push toward what could become a kind of hydrogen-powered society as the supplies dwindled and petroleum became too expensive for most people.
But things have changed in recent years to challenge that thesis. Volkswagen’s diesel cheating scandal didn’t put a nail in internal combustion’s coffin, but it did force it to pick out a burial plot. Tesla’s sky-high stock price has investors demanding the same from other car companies. And the data around rising global temperatures from carbon emissions has only gotten more shocking in recent years. Hydrogen — which shows promise in heavy trucking, aviation and industrial applications — could still be a major fuel source, but the world clearly can’t wait 100 years.
Then there’s China, which is what really made the wake-up call that kicked Japan out of bed.
This year’s Auto Shanghai show, a motor industry expo that was the first one held in person since China’s COVID lockdowns ended, showed the world just how far ahead the Chinese automakers are with battery EVs. Driven by government mandates and ample funding, their battery supply chains are robust, their sales are booming, they’re rapidly expanding into places like Europe and Australia where they’re getting good reviews to boot. (For now, Chinese cars are kept out of the U.S. market by steep tariffs, but their arrival seems inevitable — if American consumers will have them.) And in China, those buyers are turning away from “foreign” brands like Honda, Ford and Toyota to buy local.
Even if you think, as I do, that any transition to an EV car market will be messier and take longer than even car companies will publicly admit, the staggering public and private investments into battery plants and EV tech prove this is where the market is going right now. America alone is dumping billions of tax dollars into EV incentives and charging stations. Last week, Ford got a $9.2 billion Department of Energy loan and it’s certainly not for hydrogen fuel cells.
Meanwhile, demand for battery EVs is soaring; their share of the car market in America increases like clockwork every quarter. Hybrids are starting to be considered passé among the green crowd, even if they don’t necessarily deserve to be.
In order to compete in the world’s two biggest car markets now and beyond, they need to go electric. And soon.
It’s also important to understand that the entire auto industry’s move to battery electric power is a reluctant one. If any of these car companies could get a free pass to keep making the same kinds of cars and engines, with the same parts suppliers, dealer networks, and sales models they’ve used for a century, they’d take it in a heartbeat. Excitement from the marketing department masks real, palpable fears about whether they can pull it off or not, and we should all be questioning the authenticity of promises to go “zero-emission” by a hard date like 2035 even as they put billions of dollars into making new gasoline trucks and SUVs. The auto industry is slow to change on its best day, and this very expensive sea change is driven by regulations, China, and Tesla, not a passion for clean transportation.
So if you argue the Japanese automakers are behind the curve on EVs, you also have to ask, behind whom and behind how? The Tesla Model Y is now the best-selling car in the world, but Tesla struggles to launch new products; the same cannot be said of Toyota. EVs are still expensive and unprofitable for most car companies. Even Japan’s competitors are just now ramping up battery factories in America, driven by climate-friendly legislation pushed through over the past two years by the Biden administration. And every car company making EVs — GM, Ford, Hyundai, Volkswagen, all of them — is dealing with production defects, delays, software bugs, battery issues, and other problems.
But as Automotive News reported recently, Tesla and the Chinese car companies are not just making EVs but resetting the entire manufacturing process just as the “lean” manufacturing techniques pioneered by Toyota once did. Now Japan’s automakers are having to rethink how they make cars, just as they once forced the Americans and Europeans to do. Indeed, the future of Toyota manufacturing looks a lot like what Tesla’s doing now, which says a lot.
This isn’t just about making a new type of car; it’s about rethinking the entire car industry from top to bottom, including how the labor force and supply lines operate. Every automaker is still figuring it out. But while we’re still in the Wild West days of moving away from fossil fuels, waiting to act is no longer an option even from a business perspective — let alone a climate one.
Toyota’s big battery announcement does signal that change is coming. A 900-mile battery? I’ve heard these kinds of pie-in-the-sky claims from sketchy startup companies my entire career. It is not the kind of thing I hear from Toyota, arguably the most powerful manufacturing apparatus on the planet and a company whose culture stresses under-promising and over-delivering. Even Toyota’s “It’s coming!” promises around hydrogen never got this specific. So when Toyota lays down the gauntlet, I’m inclined to believe it’ll either make good on its word or come pretty damn close.
Even so, by the time the Japanese automakers get their best and most “modern” EVs on the road — software updates, more automated driving assistance, cheaper costs, better range — competitors like Ford and Hyundai will be on round two or three of doing the same thing.
For now, the Japanese automakers are probably smart to keep at least some powder dry when it comes to hybrids and hydrogen, especially in those places on Earth that might not be best served by fully electric cars quite yet. But if they don’t get moving on the EV front, they won’t have a chance to find out.
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The widely circulating document lists more than 68 activities newly subject to upper-level review.
The federal government is poised to put solar and wind projects through strict new reviews that may delay projects across the country, according to a widely circulating document reviewed by Heatmap.
The secretarial order authored by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Gregory Wischer is dated July 15 and states that “all decisions, actions, consultations, and other undertakings” that are “related to wind and solar energy facilities” will now be required to go through multiple layers of political review from Burgum’s office and Interior’s Office of the Deputy Secretary.
This new layer of review would span essentially anything Interior and its many subagencies would ordinarily be consulted on before construction on a project can commence — a milestone crucial for being able to qualify for federal renewable energy tax credits under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The order lists more than 68 different activities newly subject to higher-level review, including some basic determinations as to whether projects conform with federal environmental and conservation laws, as well as consultations on compliance with wildlife protection laws such as the Endangered Species Act. The final item in the list sweeps “any other similar or related decisions, actions, consultations, or undertakings” under the order’s purview, in case there was any grey area there.
In other words, this order is so drastic it would impact projects on state and private lands, as well as federal acreage. In some cases, agency staff may now need political sign-offs simply to tell renewables developers whether they need a permit at all.
“This is the way you stall and kill projects. Intentionally red-tape projects to death,” former Biden White House clean energy adviser Avi Zevin wrote on Bluesky in a post with a screenshot of the order.
The department has yet to release the document and it’s unclear whether or when it will be made public. The order’s existence was first reported by Politico; in a statement to that news outlet, the department did not deny the document’s existence but attacked leakers. “Let’s be clear: leaking internal documents to the media is cowardly, dishonest, and a blatant violation of professional standards,” the statement said.
Interior’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Heatmap about when this document may be made public. We also asked whether this would also apply to transmission connected to solar and wind. You had better believe I’ll be following up with the department to find out, and we’ll update this story if we hear back from them.
Two former Microsoft employees have turned their frustration into an awareness campaign to hold tech companies accountable.
When the clean energy world considers the consequences of the artificial intelligence boom, rising data center electricity demand and the strain it’s putting on the grid is typically top of mind — even if that’s weighed against the litany of potential positive impacts, which includes improved weather forecasting, grid optimization, wildfire risk mitigation, critical minerals discovery, and geothermal development.
I’ve written about a bunch of it. But the not-so-secret flip side is that naturally, any AI-fueled improvements in efficiency, data analytics, and predictive capabilities will benefit well-capitalized fossil fuel giants just as much — if not significantly more — than plucky climate tech startups or cash-strapped utilities.
“The narrative is a net impact equation that only includes the positive use cases of AI as compared to the operational impacts, which we believe is apples to oranges,” Holly Alpine, co-founder of the Enabled Emissions Campaign, told me. “We need to expand that conversation and include the negative applications in that scoreboard.”
Alpine founded the campaign alongside her partner, Will Alpine, in February of last year, with the goal of holding tech giants accountable for the ways users leverage their products to accelerate fossil fuel production. Both formerly worked for Microsoft on sustainability initiatives related to data centers and AI, but quit after what they told me amounted to a string of unfulfilled promises by the company and a realization that internal pressure alone couldn’t move the needle as far as they’d hoped.
While at Microsoft, they were dismayed to learn that the company had contracts for its cloud services and suite of AI tools with some of the largest fossil fuel corporations in the world — including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell — and that the partnerships were formed with the explicit intent to expand oil and gas production. Other hyperscalers such as Google and Amazon have also formed similar cloud and AI service partnerships with oil and gas giants, though Google burnished its sustainability bona fides in 2020 by announcing that it would no longer build custom AI tools for the fossil fuel industry. (In response to my request for comment, Microsoft directed me to its energy principles, which were written in 2022, while the Alpines were still with the company, and to its 2025 sustainability report. Neither addresses the Alpines’ concerns directly, which is perhaps telling in its own right.)
AI can help fossil fuel companies accelerate and expand fossil fuel production throughout all stages of the process, from exploration and reservoir modeling to predictive maintenance, transport and logistics optimization, demand forecasting, and revenue modeling. And while partnerships with AI hyperscalers can be extremely beneficial, oil and gas companies are also building out their own AI-focused teams and capabilities in-house.
“As a lot of the low-hanging fruit in the oil reserve space has been plucked, companies have been increasingly relying on things like fracking and offshore drilling to stay competitive,” Will told me. “So using AI is now allowing those operations to continue in a way that they previously could not.”
Exxon, for example, boasts on its website that it’s “the first in our industry to leverage autonomous drilling in deep water,” thanks to its AI-powered systems that can determine drilling parameters and control the whole process sans human intervention. Likewise, BP notes that its "Optimization Genie” AI tool has helped it increase production by about 2,000 oil-equivalent barrels per day in the Gulf of Mexico, and that between 2022 and 2024, AI and advanced analytics allowed the company to increase production by 4% overall.
In general, however, the degree to which AI-enabled systems help expand production is not something companies speak about publicly. For instance, when Microsoft inked a contract with Exxon six years ago, it predicted that its suite of digital products would enable the oil giant to grow production in the Permian Basin by up to 50,000 barrels by 2025. And while output in the Permian has boomed, it’s unclear how much Microsoft is to thank for that as neither company has released any figures.
Either way, many of the climate impacts of using AI for oil and gas production are likely to go unquantified. That’s because the so-called “enabled emissions” from the tech sector are not captured by the standard emissions accounting framework, which categorizes direct emissions from a company’s operations as scope 1, indirect emissions from the generation of purchased energy as scope 2, and all other emissions across the value chain as scope 3. So while tailpipe emissions, for example, would fall into Exxon’s scope 3 bucket — thus requiring disclosure — they’re outside Microsoft’s reporting boundaries.
According to the Alpines’ calculations, though, Microsoft’s deal with Exxon plus another contract with Chevron totalled “over 300% of Microsoft’s entire carbon footprint, including data centers.” So it’s really no surprise that hyperscalers have largely fallen silent when it comes to citing specific numbers, given the history of employee blowback and media furor over the friction between tech companies’ sustainability targets and their fossil fuel contracts.
As such, the tech industry often ends up wrapping these deals in broad language highlighting operational efficiency, digital transformation, and even sustainability benefits —- think waste reduction and decreasing methane leakage rates — while glossing over the fact that at their core, these partnerships are primarily designed to increase oil and gas output.
While none of the fossil fuel companies I contacted — Chevron, Exxon, Shell, and BP — replied to my inquiries about the ways they’re leveraging AI, earnings calls and published corporate materials make it clear that the industry is ready to utilize the technology to its fullest extent.
“We’re looking to leverage knowledge in a different way than we have in the past,” Shell CEO Wael Sawan said on the company’s Q2 earnings call last year, citing AI as one of the tools that he sees as integral to “transform the culture of the company to one that is able to outcompete in the coming years.”
Shell has partnered since 2018 with the enterprise software company C3.ai on AI applications such as predictive maintenance, equipment monitoring, and asset optimization, the latter of which has helped the company increase liquid natural gas production by 1% to 2%. C3.ai CEO Tom Siebel was vague on the company’s 2025 Q1 earnings call, but said that Shell estimates that the partnership has “generated annual benefit to Shell of $2 billion.”
In terms of AI’s ability to get more oil and gas out of the ground, “it’s like getting a Kuwait online,” Rakesh Jaggi, who leads the digital efforts at the oil-services giant SLB, told Barron’s magazine. Kuwait is the third largest crude oil producer in OPEC, producing about 2.9 million barrels per day.
Some oil and gas giants were initially reluctant to get fully aboard the AI hype train — even Exxon CEO Darren Woods noted on the company’s 2024 Q3 earnings call that the oil giant doesn’t “like jumping on bandwagons.” Yet he still sees “good potential” for AI to be a “part of the equation” when it comes to the company’s ambition to slash $15 billion in costs by 2027.
Chevron is similarly looking to AI to cut costs. As the company’s Chief Financial Officer Eimear Bonner explained during its 2024 Q4 earnings call, AI could help Chevron save $2 to $3 billion over the next few years as the company looks towards “using technology to do work completely differently.” Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco’s CEO Amin Nasser told Bloomberg that AI is a core reason it’s been able to keep production costs at $3 per barrel for the past 20 years, despite inflation and other headwinds in the sector.
Of course, it should come as no surprise that fossil fuel companies are taking advantage of the vast opportunities that AI provides. After all, the investors and shareholders these companies are ultimately beholden to would likely revolt if they thought their fiduciaries had failed to capitalize on such an enormous technological breakthrough.
The Alpines are well aware that this is the world we live in, and that we’re not going to overthrow capitalism anytime soon. Right now, they told me they’re primarily running a two-person “awareness campaign,” as the general public and sometimes even former colleagues are largely in the dark when it comes to how AI is being used to boost oil and gas production. While Will said they’re “staying small and lean” for now while they fundraise, the campaign has support from a number of allies including the consumer rights group Public Citizen, the tech worker group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, and the NGO Friends of the Earth.
In the medium term, they’re looking toward policy shifts that would require more disclosure and regulation around AI’s potential for harm in the energy sector. “The only way we believe to really achieve deep change is to raise the floor at an international or national policy level,” Will told me. As an example, he pointed to the EU’s comprehensive regulations that categorize AI use cases by risk level, which then determines the rules these systems are subject to. Police use of facial recognition is considered high risk, for example, while AI spam filters are low risk. Right now, energy sector applications are not categorized as risky at all.
“What we would advocate for would be that AI use in the energy sector falls under a high risk classification system due to its risk for human harm. And then it would go through a governance process, ideally that would align with climate science targets,” Will told me. “So you could use that to uplift positive applications like AI for methane leak detection, but AI for upstream scenarios should be subject to additional scrutiny.”
And realistically, there’s no chance of something like this being implemented in the U.S. under Trump, let alone somewhere like Saudi Arabia. And even if such regulations were eventually enacted in some countries, energy markets are global, meaning governments around the world would ultimately need to align on risk mitigation strategies for reigning in AI’s potential for climate harm.
As Will told me, “that would be a massive uphill battle, but we think it’s one that’s worth fighting.”
A longtime climate messaging strategist is tired of seeing the industry punch below its weight.
The saga of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains at least one clear lesson for the clean energy industry: It must grow a political spine and act like the trillion-dollar behemoth it is. And though the logic is counterintuitive, the new law will likely provide an opportunity to build one.
The coming threat to renewable energy investment became apparent as soon as Trump won the presidency again last fall. The only questions were how much was vulnerable, and through what mechanisms.
Still, many clean energy leaders were optimistic that Trump’s “energy abundance” agenda had room for renewables. During the transition, one longtime Republican energy lobbyist told Utility Dive that Trump’s incoming cabinet had a “very aggressive approach towards renewables.” When Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper introduced would-be Secretary of Energy Chris Wright at the fracking executive’s confirmation hearing, he vouched for Wright’s clean energy cred. Even Trump touted Wright’s experience with solar.
At least initially, the argument made sense. After all, energy demand is soaring, and solar, wind, and battery storage account for 95% of new power projects awaiting grid connection in the U.S. In red states like Texas and Oklahoma, clean energy is booming because it’s cheap. Just a few months ago, the Lone Star State achieved record energy generation from solar, wind, and batteries, and consumers there are saving millions of dollars a day because of renewables. The Biden administration funneled clean energy and manufacturing investment into red districts in part to cultivate Republican support for renewables — and to protect those investments no matter who is president.
As a result, for the past six months, clean energy executives have absorbed advice telling them to fly below the radar. Stop using the word “climate” and start using words like “common sense” when you talk to lawmakers. (As a communications and policy strategist who works extensively on climate issues, I’ve given that specific piece of advice.)
But far too many companies and industry groups went much further than tweaking their messaging. They stopped publicly advocating for their interests, and as a result there has been no muscular effort to pressure elected officials where it counts: their reelection campaigns.
This is part of a broader lack of engagement with elected officials on the part of clean energy companies. The oil and gas industry has outspent clean energy on lobbying 2 to 1 this year, despite the fact that oil and gas faces a hugely favorable political environment. In the run up to the last election, the fossil fuel industry spent half a billion dollars to influence candidates; climate and clean energy advocates again spent just a fraction, despite having more on the line. My personal preference is to get money out of politics, but you have to play by the rules as they exist.
Even economically irresistible technologies can be legislated into irrelevance if they don’t have political juice. The last-minute death of the mysterious excise tax on wind and solar that was briefly part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was a glaring sign of weakness, not strength — especially given that even the watered-down provisions in the law will damage the economics of renewable energy. After the law passed, the President directed the Treasury Department to issue the strictest possible guidance for the clean energy projects that remain eligible for tax credits.
The tech industry learned this same lesson over many years. The big tech companies started hiring scores of policy and political staff in the 2010s, when they were already multi-hundred-billion dollar companies, but it wasn’t until 2017 that a tech company became the top lobbying spender. Now the tech industry has a sophisticated influence operation that includes carrots and sticks. Crypto learned this lesson even faster, emerging almost overnight as one of the most aggressive industries shaping Washington.
Clean energy needs to catch up. But lobbying spending isn’t a panacea.
Executives in the clean energy sector sometimes say they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Democrats and the segment of potentially supportive Republicans at the local and federal levels talk and think about clean energy differently. And the dissonance makes it challenging to communicate honestly with both parties, especially in public.
The clean energy industry should recognize that the safest ground is to criticize and cultivate both parties unabashedly. The American political system understands economic self interest, and there are plenty of policy changes that various segments of the clean energy world need from both Democrats and Republicans at the federal and state levels. Democrats need to make it easier to build; Republicans need to support incentives they regularly trumpet for other job-creating industries.
The quality of political engagement from clean energy companies and the growing ecosystem of advocacy groups has improved. The industry, disparate as it is, has gotten smarter. Advocates now bring district-by-district data to policymakers, organize lobby days, and frame clean energy in terms that resonate across the aisle — national security, economic opportunity in rural America, artificial intelligence, and the race with China. That’s progress.
But the tempo is still far too low, and there are too many carrots and too few sticks. The effects of President Trump’s tax law on energy prices might create some leverage. If the law damages renewable energy generation, and thereby raises energy prices as energy demand continues to rise, Americans should know who is responsible. The clean energy sector has to be the messenger, or at least orchestrate the messaging.
The campaigns write themselves: Paid media targeting members of Congress who praised clean energy job growth in their districts and then voted to gut jobs and raise prices; op-eds in local papers calling out that hypocrisy by name; energy workers showing up at town halls demanding their elected officials fight for an industry that’s investing billions in their communities; activating influencers to highlight the bright line between Trump’s law and higher electricity bills; and more.
If renewable energy is going to grow consistently in America, no matter which way the political wind blows, there must be a political cost to crossing the sector. Otherwise it will always be vulnerable to last-minute backroom deals, no matter how “win-win” its technology is.