Corporate America and the Migration to Clean Energy

by Craig ShieldsPosted on July 8, 2010 Posted in Electric Vehicles

Want a good, quick read?  Check out (FedEx Chairman) Fred Smith’s testimony to the Senate Fiance Committee — and note in particular Joseph Lado’s comment under it.  In my estimation, this is precisely on target, and exactly the type and level of indignation that rhetoric like Smith’s needs to provoke. 

As Lado points out, there is nothing wrong with forming a group like The Electrification Coalition — but we need to note that it was formed last year. FedEx has been tinkering at the edges of this problem for years, generating fantastic publicity (famously driving a single van across historic Route 66), while making very little real progress — over a period of a couple of decades — in terms of changing out its fleet in favor of EVs.

In his letter to Fred Smith, Lado asks:

The reality is that the United States has had an oil dependency problem creating strategic, economic and pollution problems for nearly 4 decades now. When are you going to stop playing at green and make the real plunge? Please. Make a commitment, even better yet make a pledge to not purchase another petrol powered vehicles to replace retired fleet vehicles. Purchase instead, good, reliable, working and tested electric vehicles, to replace them.

It’s great to see stuff like this. The problem, of course, is that Fred Smith’s testimony has received many thousand times the volume of coverage than Joseph Lado’s insightful response.