Sleeping Dogs Listen.

An overhang of 25 million units.

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1. Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency:

Every year, the IEA’s World Energy Outlook maps out potential pathways the global energy system could take in the coming decades to help inform decision-making. This year’s report, to be released next month, shows the world is on the cusp of a historic turning point. Based only on today’s policy settings by governments worldwide — even without any new climate policies — demand for each of the three fossil fuels is set to hit a peak in the coming years. This is the first time that a peak in demand is visible for each fuel this decade — earlier than many people anticipated. These remarkable shifts will bring forward the peak in global greenhouse gas emissions. They are primarily driven by the spectacular growth of clean energy technologies such as solar panels and electric vehicles, the structural shifts in China’s economy and the ramifications of the global energy crisis. (Source: ft.com)

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2. China is set to become the world’s biggest car exporter this year, overtaking Japan. The watershed moment will mark the end of decades of dominance by European, American, Japanese and South Korean groups. Yet driving China’s global ascendancy are deep structural problems in the domestic auto industry, which threaten to upend car markets across the world. A stark mismatch between production at Chinese factories and local demand has been caused, in part, by industry executives mis-forecasting three key trends: the rapid decline of internal combustion engine car sales, the explosion in popularity of electric vehicles and the declining need for privately owned vehicles as shared mobility booms among an increasingly urbanised Chinese population. The result has been “massive overcapacity” in the number of vehicles produced in factories across the country, said Bill Russo, former head of Chrysler in China and founder of advisory firm Automobility. “We have an overhang of 25 million units not being used,” he said. (Source: ft.com)

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