As COP28 dies in the desert, another famous desert summit eyes an EV rebirth

Welcome to Callaway Climate Insights. Take advantage of our holiday sale to send a gift subscription to your favorite clean energy investor.

In today’s edition:

— As COP28 demonstrates the limits of what global summits can achieve, another desert gathering — CES — eyes a climate rebirth

— The Trump threat to America’s climate leadership is growing

— Ford is cutting its production for electric F-150 Lightnings in half, a bad sign for EV demand

— Why do these three soccer stars make more than the world’s combined climate damage pledges?

— Betting on renewables? Here’s the largest global energy group’s early line.

— The battle to tax electric vehicles has begun, in Florida

To almost nobody’s surprise, the COP28 climate summit in the Dubai desert is heading toward a disappointing close, testing the limits of what any global summit can achieve when it comes to conflicting energy interests. But the reinvention of another global conference — CES in Las Vegas next month — may show that there are ways for long-in-the-tooth expos to gain new traction.

CES, which used to be known as the Consumer Electronic Show, has been bringing tech enthusiasts to Las Vegas since the late 1960s, when it spun off from the Chicago Music Show as an electronic product’s standalone. It became red hot during the Internet 1.0 era as new gadgets using the world wide web proliferated.

As COP summits ballooned in size over the past three years, to some 80,000 attendees in Dubai this year, they started to lose their impact — much like CES did as it grew to take over Vegas every January in the early 2000s. But in the past decade or so, CES has begun to redefine itself as the place to introduce new automotive technologies. And now, kicked off this week by Honda’s HMC 0.00%↑ tease for a new electric vehicle introduction next month in Vegas, it’s becoming a go-to place for cool EV designs.

I haven’t been to a CES in almost a decade but those friends and journalists who still go assure me it is still as busy and crowded as ever. As electric transportation products — from cars and trucks to bikes and boats — begin to proliferate, flashy introductions at expos such as CES are going to increase, and perhaps even save the annual January Vegas boondoggle from an untimely demise.

As we’ve seen in Dubai, COP as an expo for oil interests and their carbon capture and storage technologies, isn’t working. Perhaps there is another, more useful way for the United Nations climate summit to reinvent itself while there is still time. Maybe having it in the Marshall Islands might do the delegates some good. . . .

Another good investment idea . . .

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Photo: Gilbert Mercier/flickr.

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