Bad green business behaviour has taken some curious turns. First came greenwashing, or companies pretending to be greener than they were. Then there was green-hushing, or firms pretending to be less green than they were so they wouldn’t be accused of greenwashing.
Now we have what you might call green-botching: well-meant environmental measures that are being implemented so badly that they backfire.
This thought crossed my mind not long ago when I sat down with a group of executives in a global company’s office canteen. “Tea or coffee?” asked our host. Everyone put in their order. The host went to the counter, only to return with the news that there would be no drinks. The canteen had abolished disposable cups, which was good, but had run out of clean reusable cups, which was less optimal.
This was a poor advertisement for green measures that need all the support they can get. So was the conversation I had recently with an executive about his company’s travel agency. Although he was under pressure to keep costs down, the agency invariably offered flights and hotels that were more expensive than what he could find online himself. His bosses were sticking with the company, though, because it was good at calculating travel carbon emissions. “If this is green,” he said, “I’d rather stay brown.”
In the annals of environmental atrocities, business travel and teacups are trifles. But it matters when green-botching happens across an entire state or nation. And this is what countries around the world are witnessing when it comes to one critical net zero component: the electric vehicle.
Governments of all stripes have spent years coaxing an EV industry to life with subsidies, regulations and death warrants marking the end of new petrol or diesel car sales.
This has helped to push lithium-ion battery costs down by 85 per cent since 2010, while electric vehicle deployment has soared more than 100 times.
The trouble is, many of the same governments are failing to roll out reliable charging networks at anything like the rate needed. Signs of a backlash are forming. Headlines in the UK this year claimed electric car drivers were ditching their vehicles “in droves” because of a lack of charging stations. It is hard to find evidence that throngs of drivers are ditching their EVs, but gripes about the sorry state of roadside charging are now ricocheting from Australia to Massachusetts and beyond.
Too many drivers struggle to find a charger and when they do, the device is too often broken, busy, or unusable without yet another card or app. During the holidays, there might also be hours of queueing.
Electric car sales have continued to rise, but it is clear that car range anxiety has been replaced by charging anxiety to the point that auto industry leaders, not just climate campaigners, are concerned.
In Europe, where sales of electric cars have grown almost three times faster than charging points over the past seven years, carmakers have warned that a lack of charging stations is “severely hampering” green vehicle growth.
There have even been problems in the EV mecca of California, where some 40 per cent of US zero-emission vehicles are sold. One study of Greater Bay Area public charging points last year found that 23 per cent didn’t work properly because of dodgy screens, payment failures and other glitches. On another 5 per cent, the cables were too short to reach the car’s charging inlet.
Help is on the way. In the US, $7.5bn has been earmarked for EV charging under the bipartisan infrastructure law passed in 2021.
New EU rules to drive investment in public roadside charging drew a step closer at the end of March. A few days later the UK confirmed it would invest more than £380mn in EV charging infrastructure. That’s sorely needed: only one standard public charger was installed for every 53 new plug-in cars last year, the worst ratio since 2020. But the British car industry understandably more.
“The fact that contactless credit or debit card payments will not be available on the vast majority of public chargers is a major failing that will significantly disadvantage EV drivers,” the UK’s Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders said recently.
This is serious green-botching. Road passenger vehicles accounted for 45 per cent of transport-related CO₂ emissions in 2018. They are an indispensable part of the net zero effort.
A consumer backlash against electric vehicles is bad for carmakers and investors. It is ultimately even worse for the planet.
