Editorial - The lie of pragmatic technological openness

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Do you remember lead in petrol? The hole in the ozone layer? Carcinogenic asbestos in walls? Probably only vaguely. Because all these sometimes deadly practices were banned from our everyday lives through regulation – not without the industry shedding crocodile tears each time beforehand.

Ford President Lee Iacocca saw the introduction of the catalytic converter as an existential threat to the automotive industry. The company that had introduced nothing less than the assembly line itself would have to shut down, he warned. The introduction of seat belts led manufacturers to predict a slump in sales – because seat belts were "destroying their designs". The Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer was labelled by parts of the industry as almost impossible to implement and financially ruinous; the ban on lead in fuel was accompanied by scaremongering campaigns that portrayed alternatives as even more dangerous.

Ford did not drown. There are more cars on our roads than ever before – all with seat belts. Our homes are better insulated than ever before, and balloons are still flying at children's birthday parties. The hole in the ozone layer is closing.

Not quite the dystopian future conjured up by the titans of industry. In fact, these laws (not to mention millions of lives saved) have not stifled innovation, but encouraged it. Do we seriously believe that companies would have given up their profit-making practices out of pure charity if politicians – "pragmatically open to technology" – had not forced them to do so?

One cannot help but notice that precisely those voices from industry and politics that shout the loudest about "openness to technology" and "pragmatism" are the ones that most consistently stand in the way of the introduction of genuine new technologies.

Take the combustion engine, which – by the way – will not be banned: Here, many are betting on a quantum leap in a technology that has made only minimal-incremental progress for decades. In 30 years, the efficiency of typical car combustion engines has risen from around 30 per cent to around 40 per cent – the rest is lost as waste heat. Three decades of research with the concentrated power of the global automotive industry… for ten percentage points.

The already dismal result is even more pathetic in practice: between 2016 and 2019, the average CO₂ emissions of new cars in Europe actually rose again because people prefer larger and correspondingly more powerful cars.