Ford is hot off the release of its all-new 2021 F-150 pickup truck, the most important model in the company’s lineup, and the best-selling pickup in America for several years running. Before that, though, it released something else – something that captured the attention of Tesla CEO, Elon Musk even more.
It was the company’s annual Sustainability Report which made a very important claim: Ford would become carbon neutral by 2050. Imagining you could eliminate all carbon emissions is utopic, which is why neutrality is reached by combining carbon removal with a hefty reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.
Ford plans to tackle the three main sources of carbon emissions: the vehicles it produces, its supply base, and the company facilities themselves. The first is simple: build as many EVs as possible, and Ford points out it has already invested $11.5 billion in its electric vehicle program but is “only getting started.” Indeed, the company already has one EV on the market, the Mustang Mach-E, and it even plans on offering a battery-powered F-150 truck, but its release just got pushed back to 2022.
The carmaker is slightly shadier when it comes to how it’ll keep tabs on its supply base, but a company the size of Ford probably has some leverage over its suppliers that it can use to impose its ways. Finally, removing the carbon footprint of its facilities is also a target for Ford, and to achieve that it claims that it “will use 100 percent locally sourced renewable energy for all manufacturing plants globally by 2035.”
That’s a strong commitment from Ford, some would say, especially since the US withdrew from the Paris Agreement so there’s little governmental pressure. Elon Musk’s answer to all this? The CEO of Tesla Motors went into full troll mode and replied: “Could be slightly faster.”
In all honesty, nobody really knows how fast we must act on climate change, but the consensus (among those who don’t deny it altogether) seems to be that the sooner, the better. We all know electric cars alone are not carbon neutral, but having a lineup made exclusively out of EVs certainly gives Musk an advantage over Ford in that respect.
And Tesla is ahead on the third point as well with its factories relying heavily on solar power. However, despite owning the bragging rights when it comes to CO2 emissions, Tesla still can’t claim to be entirely carbon-neutral, so maybe instead of acid remarks, Musk could have provided us with his company’s sustainability plan for the upcoming years? That’s probably something for a future tweet.
