A news item this week that will go down in the history of capitalism went unnoticed in the Brazilian press. The European Parliament approved the end of the sale of vehicles with combustion engines from 2035. The decision is based on several reasons. Cars, the main emitters of polluting gases, have become the new cigarette for public health experts.
With a 55% increase in the number of global deaths related to air pollution since 2000, the car is now killing more from air pollution than road accidents. Then, against the more pessimistic analyzes that predicted a stagnation in the fight against global warming after the Ukrainian War, European technocrats saw climate regulation as a weapon to accelerate
the great energy divergence between Europe and Asia.
For the auto industry, the European decision marks the end of the hegemony started by the Ford T engine, which transformed the global economy at the beginning of the 20th century. It is not by chance that the coronavirus spread through Wuhan, the “city of engines”, and by Lombardia, a parts and components hub.
It was on cars that the export model from Europe to Asia was based, put in check by the health and geopolitical crises themselves. In the United States, new captains of industry like Elon Musk, who combines libertarian speech with state subsidy, are transforming the home consumer market, with EV sales doubling from 2020 to 2022.
It would be naive to think that the emergence of more sustainable alternative models would not replicate the extractive patterns of the past. If Musk’s Tesla has achieved the unprecedented feat of shaking secular interest groups, it is also developing at the expense of what geographers call “regions sacrificed” by the exploration of minerals in Africa and Oceania.
In the worst of worlds, the electric revolution will only exacerbate climate inequality: First world citizens will live in cleaner, quieter cities, while we will continue to serve as a receptacle for an obsolete and harmful transport model for decades to come.
To prevent this fatality, the impacts of this global transition must be discussed in the elections for governor in São Paulo, whose economic formation is closely linked to the production of automobiles. If there is a consensus in the literature, it is that regions with greater historical experience are more likely to lead new innovation and technology movements. But even in avant-garde regions like São Paulo, modernization is a choice, not a destination.
The programmatic debate in the State took a new step forward at an event this Saturday (11), with the delivery of the Network’s program to Fernando Haddad’s (PT) campaign. The current view of the Network’s staff in relation to the primitive discourses of the established sectors is impressive. Far from the clichés of the last century, it is impossible to think about the energy and industrial transition today without environmentalists.
