The perennially besieged airline industry responded by cancelling thousands of flights, cutting in-flight passenger services and threatening to impose fuel surcharges on tickets. The European Union also announced it would seek to “optimize” jet fuel distribution among member states and look for alternative supply.

You’d think this geopolitical convulsion might mark the long-promised inflection point for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), a class of biodiesel additives seen by some as a way of weaning air travel from its reliance on fossil fuels. “Iran really is a ‘sharpen the markets’ case for domestic-waste-based SAF,” says Chris Cooper, CEO of XCF Global, a Reno, Nevada–based producer. The war, he adds, “[exposes] the fragility of the fossil crude inputs and supply. We’re fighting with other countries just to produce a product that brings more conflict to the global economy.”

Yet the reality is that SAF – despite years of research and development and policy stimulus on both sides of the Atlantic – has failed to establish itself as a bona fide low-carbon additive to one of the highest-emitting fossil fuels. There has been a conspicuous silence on the part of aviation players that, not so long ago, enthusiastically promoted SAF as a pathway to reduce the sector’s carbon consumption and meet its climate goals. Neither Air Canada nor the Greater Toronto Airports Authority responded to requests for comment on their own adoption timelines. Nova Sustainable Fuels, the company behind a planned multibillion-dollar SAF plant in Nova Scotia, won’t talk. And Delta yanked references to SAF from its sustainability reports a month into the war, Bloomberg reported.

All this circumspection is telling. If SAF can really decarbonize the aviation industry, why are the proponents staying quiet in the midst of the worst fossil fuel crisis since the 1970s?

Mixed signals

Among all transportation modes, aviation has been the most resistant to the adoption of alternative fuels, despite years of efforts to develop jet fuel substitutes. About 5% of fuel for road transport comes from low-carbon sources, such as biofuels, according to the International Energy Agency. Aviation has seen the highest growth in fuel demand; however, SAF still accounts for only 0.7% of all jet fuel production, with European carriers among the main users.

Not so long ago, the prospect of fostering an SAF market and supply chain generated all kinds of official and policy enthusiasm, such as the “SAF Grand Challenge Roadmap” concocted in 2022 by the U.S. departments of Energy, Transportation and Agriculture, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency. The European Union last year even mandated that all jet fuel supplied at European airports contain 2% SAF, with that benchmark rising to 70% by 2050.

The Trump administration has gutted climate policy, yet the waning of enthusiasm for SAF predates his election. In 2024, the International Air Transport Association bemoaned the “disappointingly slow growth” in SAF production, despite all the mid-pandemic progressive hype. “Governments are sending mixed signals to oil companies, which continue to receive subsidies for their exploration and production of fossil oil and gas,” the association’s director general, Willie Walsh, said at the time. “Investors in new-generation fuel producers seem to be waiting for guarantees of easy money before going full throttle.”

The regulatory nudges didn’t seem to be working. “Several countries have put policies and regulations in place to increase SAF use, such as SAF mandates in the European Union and the United Kingdom,” the International Energy Agency noted in a 2025 report. “In the accelerated case, the global SAF share climbs to 15% by 2035.” However, the operative term here is “accelerated,” which makes it more of a fond wish than a takeoff trajectory.

In the United States, some of the SAF-related tax credit from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act survived Trump’s backsliding. But the new credit tends to favour biodiesel, says Andy Navarrete, a researcher for the International Council on Clean Transportation, so SAF production remains limited.

Technical holdups

The delays in SAF adoption are also a direct result of the difficulty in ensuring that the chemistry behind these formulations is both reliable and resilient. “We identified very early on that aviation was going to be a particularly difficult sector to decarbonize,” says renewable-energy expert Warren Mabee, a Canada Research Chair at Queen’s University. Jet fuel, he says, has to remain stable under extreme temperatures and pressure changes to ensure that planes don’t suddenly experience a loss of power in mid-air.

Emerging SAF technologies that rely on cellulosic materials, like corn husks and other types of agricultural residues, or certain forms of municipal solid waste, promise lower carbon emissions but have not yet reached full commercial viability, Navarrete says. “There is a good amount of that material that’s available, but it’s not easy to convert into a liquid fuel.”

So for now, the adoption continues to be dogged by the same sorts of hard questions that orbit around other types of biofuels – namely, the source and quality of the feedstock. The EU discourages the use of waste cooking oils because of limited supply, even though such feedstocks, on average, promise an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional jet fuel and are considered to be the least expensive feedstock. “SAFs that use crops as feedstock may not reduce life-cycle [greenhouse gas] emissions at all,” Navarrete adds. “When land is cleared and repurposed for agriculture, carbon stored in the soil and vegetation can be released.”

The EU, in turn, has pushed producers to disclose the full life cycle of their production methods.

Sustainable aviation fuel made from virgin oilseeds like canola, Mabee points out, also tends to be insufficiently dense in terms of chemical makeup, rendering it less suitable for power-hungry jet engines. “This is one of the things about these fuels, they’re not chemically identical to what goes into today’s jet fuels,” he says. “But it has to be similar enough that the engines respond the same way, because there’s really no room for error in these fuels.”

Alternatives to the alternative

Some investors are looking at new alternatives to the old alternatives, such as waste biomass from forestry or municipal solid waste. Nova Sustainable Fuels, based in Halifax, late last year won conditional approval for a large-scale SAF and renewable methanol processing plant powered by wind and solar energy. The facility is to be located in Goldboro, N.S., and will run on a diet of sawmill waste and underbrush from forest management operations, with the resulting SAF exported overseas.

While the company hasn’t formally released the size of the investment, recent media reports estimate that it will cost $4 to $6 billion, with the bulk of the financing coming from Octopus Energy, a leading British renewable-energy supplier with operations around the world. Despite the size of the project (situated on 313 hectares of private and public land) and its positioning as a future mainspring of Nova Scotia’s green energy sector, Octopus didn’t respond to requests for comment, while Nova declined to schedule an interview.

XCF, the Reno firm, has an annual production capacity of 38 million gallons of SAF on a 10-acre site and is expanding its Nevada plant as well as building two others in Australia, thanks in part to new incentives adopted by that country’s national government. Cooper, an oil industry veteran, says XCF uses waste oils created by the ethanol industry, as well as by soybean processing. “We produced the product through our refinery, and then we sold all of the production back to [the oil refiner] Phillips 66,” he says. XCF’s current off-take agreement is with BGN, an energy trader based in Houston.

The most established player in this space is the Finnish energy giant Neste, which generated €19 billion in revenues last year and earned profits of nearly €1.5 billion. The company has plants in Finland, the Netherlands, California and Singapore and is the world’s largest producer of biodiesel. SAF, which is just one of Neste’s products, is processed using waste materials such as residual biomass and cooking oil.

According to its 2025 annual report, Neste’s global SAF production capability is 1.5 million tons per annum, which will grow to 2.2 million tons per year by 2027 after the expansion of its Rotterdam facility. (The company, which is partially owned by the Finnish government, makes most of the world’s SAF.) “We have seen very positive developments recently within the U.S. and in Europe regarding renewable fuel policies,” a Neste spokesperson said in a statement to Corporate Knights. “They provide a solid outlook for years ahead. Renewables provide an alternative for fossil markets that are heavily Middle East–dependent, therefore governments should see renewables as a means to increase energy supply security.”

Perhaps the most promising policy can be found in the United Kingdom, Navarrete says. There, regulators have mandated a minimum ratio of SAF for all jets. But over time, a progressively smaller proportion of the SAF can come from spent cooking oils. As well, the government has fixed a price floor for producers, an approach they also used to drive wind power investment. A combination of a mandate and a price guarantee provides demand-side and supply-side incentives for SAF refiners looking to invest in newer technologies that offer scalable production – without gobbling up valuable agricultural land. “We don’t have anything similar to that in the US,” he says.

Asking the right question

For the foreseeable future, there’s no technology competition for SAF, notwithstanding a very limited number of experiments with battery-powered small planes, such as Harbour Air’s “e-plane,” a refurbished six-seat de Havilland Beaver, which flies around B.C.’s lower mainland. If a large aviation manufacturer like Airbus or Boeing decided to develop a battery-powered passenger jet, it would likely take well over two decades to design, engineer, test and certify such a vehicle, Mabee says. “The commercial biofuels are the only real option on the table.”

Besides the lingering technical difficulties associated with blending biodiesel into jet fuel, the SAF industry’s main problem is that the price differential is too great; the financial incentives, too thin. Mabee learned this implacable fact while working with farmers on the potential for biodiesel. “Farmers will tend to deviate towards the market that’s going to give them a lot of value,” he says. “I can tell you that with biofuels, the value-add is not necessarily there. They can generally make more money selling their product for food than they can for fuel.” Which is just as well, given how ethanol distorted U.S. corn farming.

Indeed, when the International Council on Clean Transportation a month prior to the Iran war tallied up the cost of SAF compared to conventional jet fuel, the price differential was bracing. A litre of SAF cost about eight times more than a litre of jet fuel, and a range of EU-adopted regulatory subsidies reduced the gap by less than a half.

XCF’s Chris Cooper says that state and federal tax and carbon offset credits, both to biofuel refiners as well as to suppliers of the feedstock, have been instrumental in making a business case for its product. (In Canada, Mark Carney’s Liberal government last year launched a consultation about amending federal clean-fuel regulations so they stay abreast of what’s on offer for biofuel producers in the United States.) But, Cooper adds, the most salient selling point is that SAF offers essentially a hedge against the price volatility caused, in part, by geopolitical conflict. “What we’re actually providing the airlines is a bit of stability when these prices are moving.”

Should climate-forward governments be stoking a fuel that’s stuck in neutral? To answer that question, it’s worth noting the largesse that fossil fuels enjoy. As the International Energy Agency has noted, the world spent $600 billion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2023. The calculus around SAF, in other words, might finally change if the price of jet fuel wasn’t being kept artificially low.

“The danger is that the environmental element gets lost in the shuffle,” Navarrete warns. “If [policymakers] start to see SAF as a good on its own, without thinking about the sustainability implications, then we might be shooting ourselves in the foot.” 

John Lorinc is a journalist and author specializing in urban issues, business and culture.

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Kalasinga is a boda boda driver who earns a living by ferrying people and goods. Before he carries his first passenger, the 25-year-old stops at a gas station and pours $4.64 worth of fuel into his tank (all figures in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted), money he earned the previous day. “On a bad day I spend up to 1,000 shillings [$7.70] on fuel, and with the current surging fuel prices, things are getting worse,” he says.

In April 2026, petrol and diesel prices in Kenya jumped sharply, hitting some of the highest levels in the country’s history. Based on recent reports from the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (EPRA), a Kenyan government agency, petrol was selling for between $1.52 and $1.59 per litre, and diesel was about the same. EPRA attributed the increase in local pump prices to the rising cost of imported petroleum products as a result of the Iran war. Kenya’s Ministry of Energy has since trimmed taxes, enabling prices to dip by a few cents. But this reduction has done little to improve the economic picture for many boda boda riders. “Things are usually bad, but even with the rising fuel prices, we cannot hike the fares we charge because we will lose clients,” Kalasinga explains.

Kalasinga’s story is echoed by hundreds of thousands of motorcycle riders across Kenya. Motorcycles have become the backbone of last-mile transport, supporting livelihoods, small businesses and urban mobility. But behind this economic engine lies a costly dependence on fossil fuels that is squeezing incomes and, in the process, locking riders into a cycle of poverty.

Kenyan boda boda riders spend up to 60% of their daily earnings on fuel, according to research by the asset-financing company Mogo. In Nairobi, where congestion forces riders to idle in traffic, fuel consumption is even higher.

“Fuel is our biggest enemy,” Kalasinga says. “You work the whole day, but at the end what remains is very little.”

The electric advantage

To improve their margins, boda boda drivers are turning to electrified transportation. The past few years have seen an increase in the number of electric motorcycles, especially among those providing taxi services. Data from Kenya’s transport sector show that total EV registrations rose from 65 in 2018 to 4,047 in 2023 across vehicle categories, including motorcycles.

Electric boda bodas have a clear advantage for drivers – lower fuel costs – while offering wider social benefits in the form of increased energy security and lowered pollution. In Nairobi, road transport is responsible for about 40% of fine particulate matter, which has been linked to respiratory illness, heart disease and premature deaths.

“[Electric vehicles] present environmental benefits because they produce zero tailpipe emissions and align with Kenya’s largely renewable electricity mix, which is over 90% green, driven by geothermal, hydro and wind,” explains Paul Mabonga, managing director of Sentimental Energy Ltd., a solar solutions company.

Drivers have doubts

But barriers have slowed the uptake of electric motorcycles. The high cost of batteries combined with lack of accessible and affordable charging infrastructure have prompted some riders to question the product. “There have been concerns about battery range, durability and service continuity affecting adoption, especially for those whose livelihoods rely on consistent daily uptime,” explains Winnie Miranyi, operations and research associate at Africa E-Mobility Alliance, an organization focused on accelerating the transition to electric and sustainable transport across Africa.

“Interest is there, but infrastructure is not,” says Joseph Mwangi, a Nairobi-based boda boda rider who last year abandoned his electric motorcycle and returned to a petrol-powered one. “Riders ask: Where will I charge? How long will it take? What happens if the battery fails?”

These are valid concerns. “Today, lack of accessible and affordable charging infrastructure is a major barrier to electric motorcycle adoption among boda boda riders in Kenya,” Mabonga says. “Most EV solutions target middle- and high-income consumers, leaving boda boda riders, who form the largest transport workforce, locked out.”

The rise of battery swapping

Spiro Kenya, an electric mobility company, believes it has a fix for poor charging infrastructure: battery swapping. Spiro offers a service where riders visit swap stations and exchange their batteries, keeping them on the road continuously. “Rather than waiting hours to charge, riders simply exchange a depleted battery for a fully charged one in under two minutes,” explains Raymond Robert Kitunga, deputy country head at Spiro Kenya.

According to Kitunga, a full charge costs approximately $2.23 if the battery is completely depleted. “If a rider swaps at 50%, they only pay half, about [$1.12],” he adds. Spiro’s battery-swapping service can save a rider roughly $23 compared to petrol over the course of a month, Kitunga says.

The model appears to be taking root. Currently, Spiro operates in 35 counties in Kenya, with more than 22,000 electric motorbikes on the road and more than 460 battery swap stations nationwide. Across Africa, the company has roughly 95,000 bikes.

Joel Musungu, a boda boda rider from Kimilili constituency, in the western part of Kenya, uses the service. He got his motorcycle in 2022 and hasn’t regretted it. “Now, I take home up to [$4.62] a day, compared to initially where I could only make a fraction of that.”

Not a panacea

There are certainly advantages, but there are also challenges. According to Miranyi with Africa E-Mobility Alliance, infrastructure availability and reliability continue to be a major barrier. The swap stations and charging points are largely confined to urban areas, she says. In Kimilili, a rural town, there is a single swapping station, for example. That can make for long queues, especially during blackouts or if the electrical grid is sluggish, Musungu explains.

It is a genuine challenge, Kitunga admits. The company has concentrated its infrastructure in urban areas, where the demand is highest. “Setting up a swapping station is capital-intensive. It involves both civil works [real estate] and electrical infrastructure, including coordination with partners like Kenya Power,” he explains. Spiro has also tried to address range anxiety through an app that shows users the availability and traffic of swap stations in real time. But the biggest challenges continue to be financing and affordability, according to Miranyi. “Although battery-swapping models help lower battery expenses, many riders still encounter difficulties in securing credit for the motorcycle itself, with prices remaining prohibitively high.”

Pauline Ongaji is an award-winning science journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya.

This story was jointly produced by Corporate Knights and The Energy Mix.

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That’s a real disappointment, to say the least. Industrial carbon pricing is Canada’s most consequential climate policy for cutting emissions and keeping costs low, but it needs serious reform. And while the memorandum makes slight improvements to the existing system in Alberta, the deal misses the mark by a long shot when it comes to living up to the policy’s potential, and it will have knock-on effects across the country as the changes are applied in other provinces. For the moment, it puts Canada off path in terms of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

We’ll be talking about changes to electricity and industrial carbon-pricing policy for many months to come. But there’s another moment upcoming that deserves some greater public and media scrutiny: the imminent release of the federal government’s new vehicle emissions standards, the outline of which was announced by the prime minister back in February.

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At that event, Mark Carney made a clear commitment to achieve “the equivalent emissions reductions of a 75% electric vehicle adoption rate” by 2035. Our team at the Canadian Climate Institute will be watching closely to ensure that the details of the policy package give us the tools to reach this outcome.

Some analysts have already concluded that the policy will fall short.

The Pembina Institute, for instance, has modelled the government’s vehicle emissions limit for 2035 – measured in grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per mile – and found that it is not strong enough to achieve the 75% EV sales target. Clean Energy Canada has outlined a number of additional design features that will be critical for the new standard to meet in order to achieve the government’s goals. That includes questions around speed of implementation, applying a single standard across all vehicle sizes, and limiting compliance flexibilities that can undermine the policy’s integrity and reduce its emissions impact.

This is an important test for the Carney government, and not just because transportation decarbonization is critically important. This is really the first new climate policy the Carney government has announced. Every other policy it inherited from the previous Trudeau government and has either eliminated (like the consumer carbon tax) or retained in a changed form (like industrial carbon pricing and methane regulation). The new approach to passenger vehicles is a new goal clearly outlined by the prime minister himself. For the sake of its credibility generally, it behooves the government to ensure there’s a tight relationship between its expressed goal and policy detail sufficiently ambitious to get there.

This is not just a matter of reducing emissions. It’s also about ensuring that Canada keeps pace with the rest of the world and is positioned properly to succeed economically in this new age dominated by electric technologies.

Last year, nearly 100 countries broke EV sales records, according to the latest from the International Energy Agency. Globally, one in every four cars sold on the market was electric in 2025.

In China – the largest auto market in the world and the main destination of Alberta crude exports through British Columbia – nearly 55% of new cars were electric in 2025. This past April, that number reached upwards of 60%. That level of uptake is driven by superior technology and cost: 70% of battery electric cars sold in China last year were cheaper than the average conventional car.

All of this is affecting global demand for oil. In 2025, EVs displaced between 1.7 million to 2.3 million barrels of oil per day. That could more than double by 2030 to 5.3 million barrels per day, according to BloombergNEF.

These are massive disruptions to global energy markets led by rapid technology changes that are now unstoppable. They threaten to radically alter the future of the auto sector and oil production in Canada. Simply put, Canadians can’t afford to be left behind.

Rick Smith is president of the Canadian Climate Institute, the co-author of two bestselling books on the effects of pollution on human health, and the executive producer of Plastic People, a 2024 documentary chronicling the damage done by microplastics in the human body.

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Throughout it all, speculation abounds that an EV tipping point approaches.

New battery-electric vehicle (BEV) registrations in Europe took off in the first quarter of 2026, rising by nearly 30% from a year ago, as the U.S.-Israel war in Iran spiked gas pump prices to levels not seen in years, Reuters reports. BEV registrations (a proxy for sales) jumped more than 50% in March alone.

Pedal to the metal on EV sales

Estimates are that more than 21% of all new cars registered in March in the European Union and EFTA (the European Free Trade Association, whose member countries are Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland) were ⁠electric.

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom’s BEV market grew 12.8% in the first three months of 2026, with BEVs accounting for 22.5% of new car sales.

While high gas prices have been a major driver of BEV sales, new  and pre-existing – policy supports also played a role. “Generous government incentives” spurred the 50% year-on-year uptake of EVs in France, The Guardian reports.

That Nordic countries continue to outstrip their southern neighbours in BEV uptake – 98% of all new cars sold in Norway in March were BEVs, “followed by Denmark at 76% and Finland at almost 50%” – owes in part to “higher wages, generous subsidies, and extensive [public] charging infrastructure.”

Gas pump prices appear to be behind Italy’s full-throttle acceleration into the EV market, with that country experiencing a 65% year-on-year increase in EV sales in March.

Gas price concerns are also fuelling EV demand across Asia, with Japan – or rather, Toyota – offering a case in point. Toyota sold almost 3,500 EVs in March, “an increase of 4,117%” over the same month last year, Electrek writes.

EV tipping point ahead

“Rapid innovation, decline in cost and a rise in popularity” are all driving EV sales toward a tipping point “where uptake becomes self-propelling” and EVs “irreversibly replace internal combustion engine vehicles,” write the authors of a study published in early December in Nature Communications.

A combined effort by researchers from the University of Exeter, the University of Macao and the World Bank, the study found that even as the sale of gas-fuelled vehicles began to decline in 2019 (the study period ran 2016 to 2023), EV plus hybrid sales increased exponentially, with the global fleet doubling every 1.5 years. Sales in the European Union doubled every 1.3 years, while China saw EV plus hybrid sales double every year. “Our data and analysis provide evidence that several European markets and China have begun tipping towards EV dominance, although this is not convincingly the case for the U.S.,” the research team writes.

But a degree of uncertainty about the timing of the shift remains, even for strong EV markets. “Once investment is sunk into converting production lines, a return to [internal combustion vehicles] becomes comparatively expensive, irrespective of the oil price,” they write. The “imposition of new tariffs” remains the wildcard, they warn.

All eyes on China

Your average EV battery contains four basic components: the cathode (some combination of metals, often including lithium), the anode (typically graphite), the separator that keeps cathode and anode from touching explosively, and an electrolyte solution. As Bloomberg explains, China corners the market on all four.

It is also leading the charge on battery innovation. China’s latest iteration of its lithium ion phosphate battery now rivals its far more expensive kin, the nickel manganese cobalt battery, in energy density. According to its makers, the lithium ion phosphate battery can recharge “in about the same amount of time as it takes to refuel a gas car.”

China’s battery innovations extend far beyond improving the lithium ion phosphate one, however. Chinese battery-manufacturing giant CATL has just made public “six stunning new battery technology innovations, including an electric vehicle battery with driving range of up to 1,500 kilometres and the third generation of its Shenxing Superfast Charging Battery that it says can charge from 10% to 90% in six minutes and 27 seconds,” Zecar reports.

And China’s pre-eminence doesn’t end with batteries: Momenta (autonomous driving), Huawei (super-rapid-charging EV systems, among other things) and Alibaba (“intelligent cockpits”) are all headquartered there.

Meet the 2026/2027 BMW iX3

Western automakers have lost huge amounts of ground in China as new domestic highfliers like BYD seize market share. Western brands like BMW and Volkswagen held just 32% of the market this year, down from 64% in 2020, the Financial Times reports.

BMW is among those seeking to regain traction in the huge Chinese market, and it is doing so through direct collaboration with its hosts. Enter its BMW iX3, an electric sport-utility vehicle equipped with a CATL battery and the latest technology from Momenta, Huawei and Alibaba.

While Germany’s second-largest auto manufacturer intends to sell the iX3 abroad, it is also laser-focused on the domestic Chinese market. “Developed ‘in China, for China, and with China,’” the iX3 “has been deeply localized for China,” BMW states in a January release.

“Tailored to local traffic conditions and usage scenarios, the system is designed to deliver highly capable driver-assistance functions optimized for complex urban environments, highways, and long-distance travel in China, further enhancing safety, comfort, and driving confidence,” the car manufacturer adds.

Volkswagen – Germany’s largest car manufacturer – is also looking to collaborate with China. VW “plans to launch 50 plug-in hybrid and EV models in China by the end of the decade to rejig its petrol-heavy lineup with vehicles designed and engineered locally as part of its ‘in China for China’ strategy,” the Financial Times reports.

This story was originally published by The Energy Mix. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original story here. 

Gaye Taylor is a staff writer for The Energy Mix. She is passionate about showcasing what individuals and communities are doing to advance climate solutions, in Canada and around the world. 

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In a January analysis, the London-based think tank Ember compared the energy makeup of China and India at similar personal income levels and uncovered a massive difference. At $11,000, India’s current level and China’s 2012 level when purchasing-power parity is accounted for, India generates only 40% as much coal power as China did. Solar makes up 9% of its energy, compared to “negligible” amounts for 2012 China. India is the world’s most populous country, with almost 1.45 billion people, and China is second, with 1.4 billion.

But solar isn’t the only reason India is on a different trajectory: Ember is one of several global energy watchers drawing attention to the role of zero-emission bikes and tuk-tuks — three-wheeled motorized rickshaws — in the country’s accelerating green shift.

India remains the world’s second-largest net oil importer, half of which is used for vehicles. But Ember suggests that use has nearly peaked, compared to China at the same economic stage. “Road transport oil demand per capita is significantly lower, thanks first to smaller, lighter vehicles and now to the rise of electric vehicles,” write Kingsmill Bond and Sumant Sinha. Altogether, India is using cheap electric technology to “industrialise without the long fossil detour taken by China and the West.” With the country eyeing zero emissions by 2070, further electrifying road vehicles through policies designed to boost ease of use and adoption will play a critical role.

India can’t follow the same net-zero pathways that Western nations have embraced by encouraging EV adoption – only 7.5% of Indians own four-wheel passenger cars. By 2030, the Indian government’s policy think tank NITI Aayog and the Colorado-headquartered Rocky Mountain Institute have projected that 80% of two- and three-wheeled vehicles sold in India could be electric, compared to 30% of private automobiles. The IEA calls electric two- and three-wheelers “the most affordable and accessible entry point into electric mobility.” Not only do they not require significant charging infrastructure, but many of these smaller EVs can easily charge using standard sockets.

Navigating roadblocks

But there are speed bumps. Public charging and battery-swap infrastructure lags in India, especially outside of major cities like Delhi. With only about 25,000 public charging stations and 2,600 battery-swapping kiosks nationwide as of last April, rapid development is needed to reach zero-emission-vehicle goals.

Last year, Cardiff University professor Peter Wells told Polytechnique Insights that India was “lagging behind its ambitions.” Sales figures tell only part of the story. For instance, though nearly 60% of new two-wheelers sold are electric, their overall share was still only 5% in 2024. (Electric three-wheelers are more prevalent, at 50%.) EV performance in India is also still new enough to leave unsettled questions that could affect widespread adoption. “Long charging times, high ownership costs, and limited range can increase the risks for business owners investing in this new technology,” Wells said.

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In an International Council on Clean Transportation report on electric two-wheelers, Zifei Yang writes that buyers “are generally highly price-sensitive and upfront cost is often the main factor in purchase decisions,” since two- and three-wheeled EVs still cost more than gasoline models. But, Yang adds, the five-year total cost of EV ownership is less in India than for their fossil-fuel-powered cousins thanks to “battery capacity-based subsidies provided by the central and some state governments” and lower sales tax on EVs.

Competition is lowering prices, and if manufacturer announcements play out, domestic production capacity will increase by 70%. If India keeps on track with its goals, these small electrified vehicles will help it leave peak oil in the rearview mirror.

Rob Csernyik is a freelance journalist specializing in business and investigative reporting, as well as long-form features.

The post India’s many e-bikes and tuk-tuks are putting peak oil in sight appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Historically considered a theoretical shortcut across the top of the world, the geopolitically charged Northern Sea Route is gaining prominence, in particular as part of China’s “Polar Silk Road” initiative, which seeks to develop Arctic shipping routes and energy projects as an extension of the Belt and Road infrastructure diplomacy drive.  

In December, China achieved a key milestone with the maiden voyage of the China-Europe Arctic Express, a commercial liner service that travels the Northern Sea Route along Russia’s Arctic coast. The vessel Istanbul Bridge was the largest container ship to ever complete the journey, which took two months on the water and three years of preparation.  

China has long sought to establish a stronger economic and political presence in the Arctic, describing itself as a “near-Arctic state” in an official 2018 policy paper that identified warming in the region as a key incentive for deeper involvement. That paper launched China’s ambitions for a northern corridor and encouraged Chinese firms to invest in Arctic shipping infrastructure.  

But the momentum has caused concern among some big shipping players, who say the new route is still too dangerous. “Safe navigation cannot be assured,” Søren Toft, chief executive of the Geneva-based Mediterranean Shipping Company, warned in a LinkedIn post earlier this year. “Sending container ships across the Arctic raises a lot of red flags,” Sian Prior, lead adviser for the Clean Arctic Alliance, said in response to the inaugural China-Europe Arctic Express journey. Andrew Dumbrille, the organization’s North American adviser, said the industry is ill-equipped to deal with accidents such as oil spills in the region because it doesn’t have emergency-response equipment nearby. “That means any spills will stay in the water for longer, wreaking more damage,” he said. 

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Some observers suggest that China’s systematic push into the Northern Sea Route does much more than undermine Arctic safety and threaten fragile natural systems. An important yet little-noticed 2025 report, Vessels on the Northern Sea Route, was published by the Bellona Environmental Transparency Center, which is part of the Bellona Foundation, an Oslo-based non-profit that fights oil and gas pollution. Established by staff who fled Russia in 2022, the group monitors Russia’s environmental impact, nuclear safety and Arctic pollution. They found that China’s growing maritime role in the region is deeply entangled with Russian geopolitical ambitions, Western sanctions evasion and environmental risk.  

The Northern Sea Route stretches 5,600 kilometres along the Russian Arctic coast, from the Kara Gate in the west to the Bering Strait in the east. Russia asserts extensive control along the route, regulating passage through a permit-based system that requires ships to use Russian pilotage services and icebreaker escorts in ice-covered conditions. Vessels transiting the Northern Sea Route are subject to Russian tariffs for these services, and those fees are collected by a subsidiary of Russia’s state nuclear company, Rosatom, which is closely integrated with the country’s military-industrial complex and linked to its invasion of Ukraine.  

Russia’s shadow fleet in the north 

The scale of traffic along the Northern Sea Route is steadily growing, and oil represents a large share of what’s making the trip. The 2025 summer–autumn season saw 103 transit voyages along the corridor, up from 97 in 2024. Thirty-four of the vessels last year were tankers, transporting about 1.9 million tons of crude oil. Fifteen container ships made the journey, including the Istanbul Bridge, up from 11 the previous year, and altogether they carried around 400,000 tons of containers. 

 China is positioning to take a bigger piece of the pie. In September, China’s NewNew Shipping Line signed agreements to invest up to five billion rubles to build a logistics complex in Provideniya Bay, to service vessels travelling along the Northern Sea Route. The company also has plans signed to develop container shipping through Murmansk’s ice-free port. 

Bellona found that most non-Russian-flagged vessels permitted onto the Northern Sea Route in 2024 transported Russian oil to China and India, violating sanctions. This “shadow fleet,” deployed in some of the world’s most hazardous waters, comprises poorly insured aging tankers, often without appropriate ice-class certification. 

The risks are severe. In 2024, Rosatom issued 1,312 permits to 975 vessels to enter the Northern Sea Route, of which 100 sailed under non-Russian flags, including 33 tankers carrying liquefied natural gas and 22 oil tankers. About one-third of them were not ice-class vessels, and more than half of these oil tankers were more than 15 years old.  

While China’s Polar Silk Road is building an important trade link with Europe, it’s also a sign of how commercial ambition could outrun governance in one of the world’s most fragile seas. 

Gordon Feller is a Global Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. 

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Honda is being whipsawed by a decreasing emphasis on electric vehicles in the United States and a rapid shift to electric vehicles in China. The two markets are moving in opposite directions, with companies regretting EV investments in the United States and facing intense competition from upstart EV manufacturers in China.

Honda is not a company that expresses public frustration, but there was a sense of disappointment in its announcement last week about cancelling plans for three models of U.S.-made electric vehicles.

The U.S. government indicated just a few years ago that it would provide policy support for a transition to EVs and encouraged automakers to invest. Honda did just that, including a new battery plant in Ohio in partnership with LG Energy Solution. Then voters sent Donald Trump back to the White House and he dismantled this industrial strategy within months. Honda and other automakers were left exposed. Financial losses and job cuts followed.

That’s infuriating. But here is how Honda describes what happened, filtered through the language of corporate communication: “Previously, with stringent environmental regulations fully implemented in the U.S. and other countries, Honda pursued EV adoption with strong determination that striving for carbon neutrality is a responsibility Honda, as a manufacturer of mobility products, must fulfill for the future,” the company said in a news release. “However, in the U.S., the expansion of the EV market has slowed down due to several factors including the easing of fossil fuel regulations and revisions to EV incentives.”

I live in Columbus, Ohio, and I wrote about Honda for nine years while covering manufacturing and energy for The Columbus Dispatch. The company’s main North American manufacturing campus is less than an hour from Columbus, with factories in Marysville and East Liberty, Ohio.

While Honda is based in Japan, it produces more cars and light trucks in the United States than its home country and also has a major presence in China.

Honda’s announcement included disclosure of a US$15.7 billion charge related to restructuring its operations, which means the company is poised to post its first annual loss in about 70 years.

Previously, Honda had said it would manufacture three electric models in Ohio: the Honda 0 – that’s a zero – SUV, the Honda 0 Saloon and the Acura RSX. Now, all three are cancelled for production or sale in North America. They join other U.S. models that were cut, including those that made it to production, such as the Ford F-150 Lightning pickup and those halted before mass production, such as the all-electric Ram 1500 pickup.

It’s not clear what Honda’s decision means for the Honda-LG battery plant that began production late last year in Jeffersonville, Ohio. That plant, which has about 600 employees, was going to provide batteries for the RSX and other models. “As our company assesses the impact of Honda’s announcement on our operations, we are in discussions with our parent companies regarding related future business opportunities that align with the technology and expertise we have developed,” says Caroline Ramsey, a spokeswoman for the battery plant, in an email.

Honda’s other plants in the state will use the capacity that was slated for EVs to produce gasoline models, including gas-electric hybrids.

The company has struggled with its EV strategy over the last decade. Its greatest success has been the Honda Prologue SUV, introduced in 2024, which is part of a partnership with General Motors and shares components with the Chevrolet Blazer.

The now-scrapped models, headlined by the Honda 0 series, were part of the company’s attempt to signal a new beginning, with fresh designs and new technology.

There’s just so much uncertainty broadly in the U.S. economy right now.

— Hannah Hess, director of energy and climate practice at Rhodium

Honda is a major reason Ohio is a leader in automobile manufacturing employment, trailing only Michigan and Indiana. These next EVs were going to be Honda’s statement about how it intended to compete in the market of the near future.

Now, Honda and other automakers in the U.S. market are left to watch and wait.

Rhodium Group, a research firm, issued a report this week that gives a sense of the scale of investment that took place in recent years and the cancellation of some of that investment.

In 2025, companies said they were cancelling US$22 billion in previously announced EV or battery manufacturing projects in the United States, the report said. This exceeded the $17 billion in new EV or battery manufacturing announcements made last year.

To get a better sense of what’s happening, I looked at the indispensable database of project announcements from Rhodium and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. It shows a spike in investment in 2022, the year President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, a law with incentives for EV manufacturing and purchases. Companies announced $80 billion in U.S. investment that year, and another $47 billion in 2023.

About half of last year’s cancellations by dollar value, or $11 billion, involved projects announced in 2022. The largest was a $4.3-billion EV manufacturing project from General Motors in Orion, Michigan. That’s a lot of investment going up in smoke, but I also urge observers to note that most of those 2022 projects are still active, either operational or under construction.

What we don’t know is if the cancellations to date are just the start of a larger wave. “The outlook looks cloudier than it did a year ago,” says Hannah Hess, director of Rhodium’s energy and climate practice. The next steps, she says, will be determined by many factors, including consumer demand for EVs and automakers’ assessment of where the market is heading. “There’s just so much uncertainty broadly in the U.S. economy right now.”

One thing the Rhodium report doesn’t capture are layoffs at plants that remain open, and that’s something else to watch.

SK On, the South Korean battery manufacturer, said last week that it is laying off 958 people at a plant in Commerce, Georgia, that had 2,566 workers before the reduction. The company cited a decline in demand for EV batteries.

Some jobs and investment could come back. The United States could reassert itself as a place where the cars of the future are built.

But gyrations in policies have a cumulative effect, reducing confidence in the staying power of any one policy. The next time a U.S. president says it’s time to invest, automakers are likely going to react more carefully.

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Corporate Knights’ annual Global 100 ranking adds more grist to that mill. Of the nine automakers on this year’s list, six are based in China: XPeng (20), Li Auto (29), Nio (30), Zhejiang Leapmotor Technology (43), Seres (63) and Yadea (60), which mainly makes electric two-wheelers. Tesla is a U.S. company, but about half of its production is in China, and BorgWarner, headquartered in Michigan, also has plants in China. A significant number of Western automakers use Chinese batteries in their EVs, too.

But China’s EV market can be hard to parse. In November, The Atlantic published an explosive article contradicting the main narrative around the growth of its industry and purporting that “China’s EV Market Is Imploding.” In the article, Beijing-based writer Michael Schuman points to the pervasive practice of selling zero-mileage “used” cars and claims that the Chinese Communist Party artificially keeps struggling manufacturers afloat.

China, with its cheap electric cars, is teaching Western automakers a lesson, as they build unaffordable, large, luxurious electric models.

– Colin Pratte, transportation researcher, IRIS

In the West, popular perception varies widely, suggesting the distorting effects of online misinformation and a lack of independent data. Chinese cars are thought to be more technologically advanced than their Western counterparts, but their production is considered dirtier than in Europe or North America because of coal-heavy electricity and pollution from upstream processes like mining and mineral processing. But Colin Pratte, a transportation researcher at the Institut de recherche et d’informations socioéconomiques in Quebec, suspects that the latter perception is influenced more by racism than reliable data and that steep tariffs on China’s EVs in Canada and the United States reflect pure protectionism, not high ecological standards.

A big lead

China isn’t the only country propping up its automotive sector, argues Thomas Hundal, a Toronto-based automotive journalist: “To some extent, subsidies are offered everywhere, and people exploit them.” That’s a problem that’s not unique to China, or to EVs, he says, adding that pre-registration, or listing new cars as used, has been a practice in Europe for ages.

According to Reuters, the top 10 countries buying China’s EVs are Mexico, Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Belgium, Germany, Australia, Indonesia, South Korea and the United Kingdom.

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China’s EV industry is more technologically advanced than the West in two main areas, Hundal says. The first is its battery supply chain: “They can produce huge numbers at low cost compared to North America. China is also years ahead of the Western manufacturers in terms of chemistry, with more impressive discharge rates and higher energy density.” China also has a big lead in charging; their stations are substantially more powerful than North America’s, according to Hundal. Broadly, China has been working on its EV market “in a larger and more serious capacity than the West has,” and for longer.

“China, with its cheap electric cars, is teaching Western automakers a lesson, as they build unaffordable, large, luxurious electric models,” Pratte says. China’s small, inexpensive cars compete directly with the big electric SUVs that Western automakers are pushing with the backing of their own governments. If governments really wanted to reduce greenhouse gases by electrifying transportation, they would welcome cheap Chinese EVs with open arms, Pratte says.

Following a pattern

As few as 15 of the 129 Chinese EV brands are predicted to achieve financial viability by 2030, according to the financial advisory firm AlixPartners. Looking at the stiff competition and excess manufacturing capacity in China’s EV sector, Hundal expects to see major upheaval. “If we go back 100 to 120 years, there were thousands of manufacturers in Canada and hundreds in [the United States]; some survived but most didn’t. I expect that to be the sort of trajectory we will see in China,” he says.

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The threat posed by companies like Nio, Li Auto and XPeng is reminiscent of Toyota’s introduction to the West, when it rapidly gained market share by focusing on affordability and fuel efficiency. Western carmakers at the time emphasized size, power and styling, but Toyota’s big challenge pushed them to overhaul their manufacturing processes and improve their quality and durability. Chinese automakers could force a similar overhaul today by exposing weaknesses in the Western firms. However, its disruptive potential must first overcome the nationalist and protectionist tendencies that have long been the hallmarks of the auto industry.

Ophélie Dénommée-Marchand is a Quebec-based independent journalist with a focus on fact-checking and investigation. She’s also an encyclopedist for the Canadian Encyclopedia.

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But a Quebec green-tech investor thinks he can break the mould and go mainstream.

This winter, François Boutin-Dufresne, a serial entrepreneur based in Montreal, is launching ShareCharge, an app that connects drivers with private EV chargers. In doing so, he hopes to solve the most pernicious challenge limiting EV adoption: range anxiety.

A 2024 J.D. Power study found that nearly three-quarters of Canadians described themselves as unlikely to buy an EV, with most citing limited range as the main obstacle. Surveys in Quebec, the leader in Canada when it comes to EV adoption, show that two-thirds of respondents also felt the charging network needs expansion, especially in rural areas, although data suggest range anxiety decreases over time for EV owners. In Quebec, some 80% of charging is done at home, making the jurisdiction a prime spot for ShareCharge’s proposition.

Boutin-Dufresne, a former economist for the Government of Canada and the International Monetary Fund, draws inspiration from Uber. ShareCharge would allow users to adjust prices according to supply and demand, with rates fluctuating up or down. For example, more expensive and efficient charging equipment would cost more to rent. He predicts that increased demand during holidays or major events will create hot spots where people can earn more from their chargers. Remote locations will also enable rural owners to charge a premium.

Boutin-Dufresne believes that civil society cannot sit by and wait for the government to build out the necessary EV infrastructure. “People need to take matters into their own hands,” he says.

Filling the infrastructure gap

Quebec launched Canada’s first public charging network for electric vehicles in 2011, before the technology really took off, and now has around 6,500 public stations in Montreal and nearly 30,000 across the province.

But its reach has remained too limited, Boutin-Dufresne argues. The impetus for ShareCharge came from his own struggles as an EV owner. He was tired of what he calls EV charging deserts where he has to travel three kilometres or more to replenish his car.

Boutin-Dufresne’s brash, fast-talking demeanour is reflected in his company. Prior to its planned official rollout in December, ShareCharge already purports to be “the world’s largest EV charging network” on its website, even though it had only 150 registered providers. But Boutin-Dufresne believes the network can quickly attract 10% of Quebec EV drivers and owners of home-charging stations, representing 40,000 new places to power up an EV.

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“Chargers on the side of the road cost the city of Montreal $50,000 each; ours cost the government nothing to improve access,” Boutin-Dufresne says.

ShareCharge is planning to expand across North America, though Quebec’s abundant, low-cost hydroelectricity will make the service more affordable there than in most other regions. Boutin-Dufresne is betting that Quebec’s fierce winters increase the appeal for drivers to have access to a large private network of EV chargers.

He aims to develop partnerships with Communauto, Quebec’s popular car-sharing service, and other vehicle rental companies. He believes the charging stations will attract Uber drivers, as well as more people who are not property owners, do not have private charging stations, and park their EVs on the street.

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But users who want to earn passive income from their EV chargers also have to shoulder the risk of things going wrong. ShareCharge takes care of quality control and validation for those who wish to rent out their charging stations, and individuals rely on the five-star rating system to avoid renting to users with undesirable behaviour, as is done on Uber or Airbnb. The company does not, however, cover risks that may arise from its use. If someone’s charging station is located in their garage and a customer’s car catches fire, it is up to the owner of the charging station to assume the risk.

Public versus private

The company’s plans also raise questions about government subsidies for private chargers. “It’s a public policy failure that the government, which invested massively in this infrastructure, did not think ahead and come up with this idea themselves,” says Thomas Hundal, an automotive journalist in Toronto.

Critics argue that the public sector should retain control of the charging economy to make it more accessible. “Across the world, governments are following the same modus operandi: they invest public funds to build a basic charging infrastructure so that, in a second phase, it becomes attractive for the private sector,” says Colin Pratte, a transport researcher at the Institut de recherche et d’informations socioéconomiques, a Quebec-based non-profit. He argues that instead of ceding the race for better charging infrastructure to private companies that “parasitize the sharing economy under the guise of enabling it,” it would be better to optimize public networks and keep prices low. Pratte believes EV charging is headed toward a repeat of the mistakes that led to the oil shock, where gas prices became unaffordable.

The Quebec government is preparing to invest nearly a billion dollars in its EV transition by 2028. According to its 2023 projections, there will be two million EV drivers in the province by 2030, though EV sales have been losing momentum since late 2024.

Ophélie Dénommée-Marchand is a Quebec-based independent journalist with a focus on fact-checking and investigation. She’s also an encyclopedist for the Canadian Encyclopedia.

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In September, General Motors cut output at its EV plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, following on the delayed opening of a new truck plant last fall. Last summer, Ford scrapped plans for a big electric SUV and cut EV spending. And this past winter, Stellantis paused manufacturing of some EVs while putting new emphasis on hybrid vehicles.

But from this pit of sagging expectations, one North American automaker is springing back. In August, Ford unveiled its “Universal EV Platform,” a new concept in affordable production that it labelled “a Model T moment,” in a nod to its origin story. Ford’s iconic Model T motor buggy was a breakthrough in mass production and simple design that launched the modern automotive industry – and today’s car-based society – by reducing the cost of the family car from $825 in 1909 to $260 by 1925.

Ford CEO Jim Farley says the novel production process – combining a new, US$3-billion battery plant in Michigan with a $2-billion assembly system in Kentucky – will bring the price of EV pickups and crossover vehicles down to US$30,000, or roughly half the average cost of new EVs today in the United States.

Farley says the breakthrough comes from charging a small, elite innovation team in California – led by Tesla veteran Alan Clarke – to reimagine the way cars are made. “We locked the doors and kept the project secret,” said Ford EV chief Doug Field. “It had permission to question everything.”

The new system replaces an assembly line with an “assembly tree,” on which the front, back and floor of the vehicle will be assembled separately, and then brought together at the end of the line. The vehicles – a midsized pickup at first – will feature 20% fewer parts and a floor that’s actually an economical, 400-volt lithium iron phosphate battery. “Our target is a five-year cost of ownership that will be lower than buying a three-year-old Tesla Model Y, and they are pretty cheap right now,” Field said.

Industry watchers were quick to note that many of Ford’s innovations resemble systems already developed by Tesla and also employed by Chinese competitors. “That was a watershed moment,” Terry Woychowski, a former auto executive, told Yahoo Finance. “Before you can beat somebody, you better catch up with them, so that’s a huge step.”

“We’re only in the second inning of this EV transformation,” Farley told The Detroit News earlier this month. “I don’t take anything for granted about the continuous improvement we have to make.”

But car-buyers continue to be spooked by high prices. A recent survey found that 73% of consumers report holding off from buying a new vehicle for budget reasons. While Ford’s plans for a $30,000 electric pickup might not be affordable enough for many buyers, other carmakers are also rushing to bring entry-level EVs to market: Chevrolet, Jeep and Honda all have sub-$30,000 EVs on the horizon.

Elon Musk, meanwhile, has abandoned his pledge to produce a $25,000 Tesla (the low-priced Model 3 sells for $42,500 in the United States), so critics are granting Ford the win for building North American–made EVs that just may compete with low-cost Chinese automakers.

With files from Mark Mann.

Rick Spence is the editor-at-large at Corporate Knights.

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