Toyota Promoted Its Hybrid While Funding Climate Deniers

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What do you consider what you’re offered with a picture of the Toyota Prius hybrid? Like most individuals, your associations are in all probability linked with defending nature and lowering useful resource depletion. You’re additionally someone who acknowledges that our local weather has been altered by people via fossil gasoline use and their ensuing emissions. You’ve at all times seen Toyota as a accomplice devoted to lessening world warming. It’s been a mirage, subterfuge, an out-and-out lie. Really, Toyota has a major observe report of funding local weather deniers.

Local weather deniers? Sorry, but it surely’s true. Toyota Motor Company (TMC) is against the electrical car (EV) revolution. It has develop into the most important funder of US lawmakers who deny the existence of the local weather disaster. The world’s largest automaker has been behind the scenes influencing US politics in a sustained try to carry EVs from mainstream adoption and to take care of its market share.

Watchdog group Public Citizen says that Toyota — after the 2024 election, with Toyota’s climate-denying allies coming into energy — “is poised to marshal an assault on climate policy. However, it is a risky strategy. Its failure to build EVs has left it vulnerable to an influx of competitors who have embraced the next generation of vehicles.”

Toyota holds nice sway in Japan because the nation’s largest firm, having income and a market cap about twice that of the closest runner-up. Public Citizen states that Toyota “holds the kind of cultural cache that can only be compared to General Motors in its heyday, which has given Toyota an immense amount of political power.”

A report from Public Citizen has disclosed how Toyota has donated considerably over the past three election cycles to local weather denier candidates. “Driving Denial” outlines how Toyota has contributed to 207 local weather deniers operating for workplace. US Home Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA.) obtained $10,000, Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO) acquired $7,000, and others, together with Rep. James Comer (R-KY), David Schweikert (R-AZ), and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), obtained a complete of $808,500 — all of whom deny or query the existence of local weather change.

In a city corridor, Johnson mentioned, “The climate is changing, but the question is, is it being caused by natural cycles in the atmosphere over the span of the Earth’s history? Or is it changing because we drive SUVs? I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver.” He has additionally led the hassle to attempt to strip funding for inexperienced power from the IRA.

What’s Toyota’s rationale for quietly constructing a robust US affect operation to weaken local weather coverage by supporting local weather deniers?

• The corporate has lagged behind its opponents in making the wanted transition to EVs.
• Toyota can also be the one main automaker that has did not set a goal for 100% EVs.
• It’s stagnant in its inside combustion engine (ICE)-powered hybrid know-how.
• It wager on hydrogen-powered autos, which have failed within the market.
• Toyota is weak to its opponents, who’ve surpassed the key automaker within the buildout to subsequent era autos.
• The corporate has had issue lowering its carbon footprint, failing even to cut back its greenhouse fuel emissions by 15% from 2018 to 2026.
• As an alternative of innovating, Toyota has funded the campaigns of climate-hostile lawmakers and paid lobbyists to squash inevitable EVs.

Between 2019 and 2023, Toyota spent over $31 million simply on US federal lobbying. Toyota has deceptively marketed its gas-powered hybrids as EVs as an alternative of investing in EVs.

Final yr presently, Toyota agreed with Panasonic Holdings Company to make Primearth EV Power Co., Ltd. an entirely owned subsidiary with a view to strengthen its capabilities in mass-producing automotive batteries, with the acquisition scheduled to happen in late March. Extra aggressive batteries would improve the attraction of Toyota’s present hybrid choices and contribute to attaining carbon neutrality via a multi-pathway strategy.

Whereas ramping up its lobbying efforts for local weather deniers, Toyota has invested in carbon-intensive hydrogen-powered autos such because the Miraia hydrogen gasoline cell car (HFCV) launched in 2014. The Mirai has bought fewer than 25,000 models and has failed to supply customers with the infrastructure wanted for HFCVs, with simply 60 hydrogen refueling stations within the US and Canada — resulting in a category motion lawsuit in opposition to the automaker.

Forward of the Paris Olympics, which Toyota sponsored, 120 scientists, engineers, and teachers wrote an open letter to organizers calling on them to drop the Mirai because the official car of the video games. That’s as a result of over 99% of hydrogen is made with fossil fuels and hydrogen manufacturing emits about as a lot yearly as all world aviation, making hydrogen autos far dirtier than EVs. Like Toyota’s broader greenwashing technique, the Mirai presents a veneer of inexperienced power however is definitely only a mirage.

In a counterattack on November 8, 2024, throughout a digital press convention, Jack Hollis, the chief working officer for Toyota Motor North America, told reporters the EV mandates which are set to start out subsequent yr in California and different states are “impossible” to satisfy. In the event that they’re not modified, he mentioned, they will lead to less customer choice in a number of states.

Simply 5 days after that, the Japanese information outlet Nikkei printed a narrative detailing Japanese automakers’ plans to ramp up lobbying within the second Trump administration. In late November, Hollis wrote a Wall Road Journal op-ed entitled “Trump Can Get EVs Back on Track,” calling on the brand new administration to dismantle the Biden-era insurance policies that encourage automakers to cut back emissions. It complained that “unrealistic regulations favor one carbon-reducing option over, and at the expense of, all others.” On Christmas Eve, Toyota introduced it was donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and his coterie of local weather deniers.

In the meantime, a coalition of automakers sent a letter to once-and-future President Donald J. Trump with the request to proceed the Biden-Harris administration’s EV insurance policies. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, composed of 42 automakers together with Ford and Common Motors, mentioned they’re in favor of current EV tax incentives and emissions laws. They argue that the auto business can solely achieve success whether it is allowed stability and predictability in auto-related emissions requirements. Automakers already are on a path to transportation electrification, with investments of billions of {dollars} devoted to EV analysis and growth.

Traders seem to count on the EV market to proceed its speedy progress. The S-curve is a well-established phenomenon the place a profitable new know-how reaches a sure catalytic tipping level (sometimes 5–10% market share) after which quickly reaches a excessive market share (i.e., 50%+) inside only a couple extra years as soon as previous this tipping level.

There’s a self-reinforcing cycle the place the know-how turns into more cost effective because it turns into extra prevalent. That’s actually the case for EV batteries, which fell by 20% in price in 2024 alone. Sorry, Toyota. You wager on the flawed horseless carriage.

Featured picture: “Steel Wool Prius” by wgreenephoto is licensed below CC BY 2.0.