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Last year, Eastern Ohio was affected by a major loss when General Motors made the decision to close their Lordstown facility, a major part of this small town. Since then, a banker by the name of Steve Burns, now CEO for Lordstown Motors, is starting from the ground up with hopes to revive the facility once again.

Electric and autonomous trucks have made huge leaps in technology in the past several years.  Having said that, wide scale implementation within the trucking industry is still years away.  Automated distribution centers however will be tested very soon. Tech companies have received financing to launch startup businesses within the sector. “Outrider, a technology based company out of Golden, Colorado, has received $53 million to launch its startup and will begin beta testing of automated electric trucks at five yards in the U.S.,” Josh Fisher of FleetOwner reports.  Outrider posted a short video to its Twitter page to give the public a glimpse of how the process works, see below:

On Tuesday the United Kingdom’s government announced a ban on the sale of Internal Combustion Engines starting in 2035 (five years earlier than previously planned). Meaning it will eventually be illegal to sell new gas, diesel, and even hybrid powered cars to adhere to this standard. Many governments across the world have plans of internal combustion engine bans in the coming decades. Germany is cracking down on older diesel cars. France wants to ban diesel and gasoline cars by 2040.Norway wants only electric or plug-in hybrid cars to be available by 2025. California's state government has stopped buying gasoline sedans for fleets, and the state itself seems to be flirting with an eventual ban too.

Last year the provincial government of Ontario, Canada canceled their generous zero-emission vehicle rebates causing sales of electric vehicles (EV) to plummet. The cancellation of this incentive program lead to Ontario being the only Canadian province to see a decrease in sales.

According to a global energy industry forecast, oil growth will continue to soar until the 2030’s and climate-damaging emissions will keep climbing until at least 2040. The World Energy Outlook is not only closely watched by the oil industry but also the governments due to its relevance to climate policy. The International Energy Agency said that almost 20% of the growth in last year’s global energy use was “due to hotter summers pushing up demand for cooling and cold snaps leading to higher heating needs.” The Internation Energy Agency (IEA) forecast global oil demand to be 106.4 million barrels per day by 2040 (up from 96.9 million last year).