Carlos Tavares, in Paris October 18, 2022. STEPHANE MAHE/ Portal
Carlos Tavares promised it, he did it. Wednesday March 29th at 2:30 p.m. the first meeting of the Freedom of Movement Forum will take place online, “an annual gathering of contributors dedicated to figuring out how clean, safe and affordable mobility can be brought into society can be brought.” the challenges of global warming”. Their mission: “Solve problems with a fact-based approach. »
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Who are the contributors? Potentially everyone. The forum, which will be held entirely online, is open to all. Just register there. The Stellantis boss has chosen to co-chair his council with Sobel Aziz Ngom, General Manager of the Senegal Youth Consortium. Around them they invited five experts: Massimo Ciuffini, an architect in charge of mobility at the Foundation for Sustainable Development in Rome, François Gemenne, migration specialist and co-author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kristina Lund , CEO of the American energy company AES, Reema Nanavaty, Director of the Indian Association of Self-Employed Women, and Jaehak Oh, President of the Korea Transport Institute.
This new place of debate is an institutional beast in itself. On June 13, 2022, Carlos Tavares announced that Stellantis is leaving ACEA to create this forum. It was five days after the European Parliament voted on the text banning the sale of heat engines in Europe after 2035.
The right order
In the eyes of the boss of the world’s fourth-largest automobile group, the European lobby, still paralyzed by the “Dieselgate”, could not convince the MPs that they were tackling the problem from the wrong side. That’s why he wants to sensitize the public in his own way.
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The right mandate for decarbonizing the automobile, he repeats at every press conference, would have been for Europe to first expand the production of green electricity – or at least decarbonize it – and only then create a charging infrastructure for electric cars and then ban the sale of thermal cars. Too bad it took twenty years. In the meantime, motorists would have continued to buy lower-emission engines than those in old cars, which in certain countries are charged with electricity from gas or even coal-fired power plants, and which they will keep for too long before they are able to buy electric cars that still do are too expensive.
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