Nissan Motor Co expects that zero-emission cars will make up to 20 percent of its sales in Europe by 2020.
Director, Electric Vehicle of the company, Mr. Gareth Dunsmore, explained that Nissan welcomed France’s commitment to reward those who choose more sustainable vehicles.
According to CNN, France would aim to end the sale of gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2040 and become carbon neutral 10 years later.
“By 2020, where the market conditions are right, I’m confident we’ll be selling up to 20 percent of our volume as zero emissions vehicles and this will only grow,” Dunsmore stated.
Digital advert: News outlets bargain with Google and Facebook
Following the takeover of digital advertising by Google and Facebook for free, news organisations are making efforts to win the right to negotiate collectively with the big online platforms.
According to CNN, it’s an uneasy alliance that has publishers chafing at the returns they receive from Google and Facebook, which rely on the free flow of premium news and information.
It’s an extreme measure with long odds. But the industry considers it worth a shot, given its view that Google and Facebook, regardless of their intentions, are posing a big threat to their survival.
The News Media Alliance, the main newspaper industry trade group, is leading the effort to bargain as a group. But it has buy-in across the spectrum of its membership, bringing together competitors like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, among others.
“We’re committed to helping quality journalism thrive on Facebook,” Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of news partnerships, said. “We’re making progress through our work with news publishers and have more work to do.”
This week, Facebook executives will meet publishers to introduce new ways for them to sell subscriptions on the site. It will be the latest of several moves over the past few months to improve exposure for local news in the site’s news feed and make it easier for news sites to run their own ads in Facebook’s Instant Articles program.
Google has made similar efforts through its News Lab. It says it has made changes to its algorithm to show quality news more prominently in search results. And it is working to help newsrooms take advantage of new technology to innovate and increase online revenue.
“We want to help publishers succeed as they transit to digital,” Google said in a statement, calling the effort “a priority.”
Publishers say they appreciate how Google and Facebook put their news content in front of many millions of users they couldn’t reach on their own. And they acknowledge the efforts the platforms are making to help.
Mike Klingensmith, the publisher of The Star Tribune and the chairman of the News Media Alliance, revealed in an interview, “they’re talking to us, but there hasn’t been a lot of action yet.”
Even if more help comes as promised, the economic imbalance leaves the industry at the mercy of the platforms’ generosity or immediate public relations imperatives: Facebook and Google are on the way to holding nearly 60 percent of the online advertising market, according to eMarketer.
In seeking the right to negotiate together, the news providers are trying to avoid the trouble that major book publishing houses got into when they worked with Apple to develop an online book rival to Amazon. Without any government clearance, they ran afoul of antitrust
laws.
The Alliance acknowledges that its bid requires legislation giving them specific clearance to negotiate as a group, which is not commonly granted. It’s an especially big ask from a Congress that hasn’t had a great legislative batting average and whose controlling party, the Republicans, is not in a very press-friendly mood these days.
