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Tesla sales continue to plunge. But a former Tesla employee’s startup now has a long waiting list for a very different type of product: an electric motorcycle aimed at customers in Africa and South Asia. The startup, called Zeno, officially launched its first product today, a sport utility electric motorcycle called the Emara. Ranging from $1,000 to $1,500 depending on the market, it’s designed to be cheaper than gas alternativesand do a better job of carrying heavy loads or multiple passengers on rough roads. The battery, which is sold separately, can either be charged or instantly switched out at swapping stations. After a soft launch with several dozen customers in small Kenyan cities several months ago, it already has loyal fans. Zenos founder and CEO, Michael Spencer, had never been a car guy. Instead, he’d worked at Tesla because of its bigger vision for sustainable energyhow battery storage and solar power fit in with mobility, and what it would take to replace fossil fuels at a larger scale. But then he realized it would be possible to work faster outside of Tesla. [Photo: Zeno] Spencer left Tesla in 2022, after four years of scaling up the Model 3 and Y, deploying Superchargers, and leading the companys energy business. I had a pretty deep understanding of what was and wasnt working at Tesla, he says. He also had worked in Africa in the past, and recognized that the fastest growth in greenhouse gas emissions was happening in emerging economies. I came to some conclusions that the original Tesla master plan was going to be, somewhat paradoxically, easier to execute on and accomplish and achieve in emerging markets, Spencer says. [These are] markets where theres still a lot of greenfield development opportunity for energy infrastructure. A large portion of the population isnt grid connected yet, but is being grid connected quickly. GDP growth is increasing, the middle class is growing, and energy consumption is increasing. One point of intervention: motorcycles. When someone living in a country like Kenya earns enough money to buy a vehicle, its typically a gas motorcycle. Spencer saw an opening for a better electric version. Chinese manufacturers make electric scooters, but they arent well suited to the common use in Africa: three or four passengers, with heavy loads, on rugged, bumpy roads. High-end electric motorcycle brands for other markets, like Damon, were unaffordable. Other companies hadnt focused on redesigning the standard, mass-market 150cc motorcycle from the ground up. [Photo: Zeno] We started with a similar thesis as we did at Tesla, which is, whatever we make has to be as good or better than the options that [customers] have currently,” says Spencer. “It has to be a more delightful vehicle to operate. We set out to create a better vehicle than the most popular 150cc motorbikes: carry more load, go faster, handle rougher terrain, go up steeper hills. Better across all of those, but then still affordable and accessible. Adding performance and range to the vehicle added cost. So to make it affordable, the startup had to rethink the business model. Customers have the option to buy the bike without a batterythe most expensive partand then rent batteries at swapping stations. “It allows you to treat the vehicle and the battery separately, as two different commercial assets, and allows you to sell the vehicle up front more affordably and spread the cost of the battery out over time,” Spencer says. “And it solves for range. You can swap a battery at a Coca-Cola-sized vending machine. In about half the time it takes to fuel a motorbike, you can get another charged battery and sufficient range.” [Photo: Zeno] The biggest draw for customers is cost: Gas motorcycle drivers in Africa routinely spend more on fuel, in absolute terms, than commuters in California. In relative terms, it’s much more: a $3,000 annual fuel bill can be 30% to 50% of their income. When the company soft-launched the product in small towns in East Africa several months ago, with a small network of charging stations, the first customers immediately saw a financial benefit. “From the day after they’ve purchased it, they’re seeing their take-home income going up 25%, or in some cases 35% or 40%. It’s like going to somebody who commutes from Oakland to Palo Alto who drives a Toyota Corolla and makes $100,000 a year and saying, ‘Look, switch to a Model 3, and you’re going to now see your take-home income go to $125,000 a year, Spencer says. The cost was critical for investors. “One piece of the puzzle for us is, do the economics work, or are you asking somebody to pay a green premium?” says Mike Winterfield, founder and managing partner at Active Impact Investments, which invested in a seed round in 2023 and another follow-on round in 2024 along with Lowercarbon Capital, Toyota Ventures, and others. (Zeno has raised $17.92 million to date.) “Like, oh, I want a motorbike that’s better for the environment, so I’ll pay a little bit morewe don’t like that. We like stuff that’s cheaper, better, faster already for the consumer, and the environment is a drag-along benefit, so there isn’t ales friction.” [Photo: Zeno] The design was another selling point. Some competitors were also working on electric motorcycles for the African market, but they “sort of like slapped together components from other bike manufacturers and ended up with something that was subpar, and getting quite poor reviews from their early customers,” Winterfield says. Zeno, he says, “built something that customers adored” from the beginning. The batteries can play another role: When they’re plugged in to charge, they can support the grid by charging when demand is low. Customers can also take the batteries home. If they have access to electricity at home, they can charge the batteries there. But if they don’t, the batteries can charge other devices when they’re not in the bikes. “We’ve got customers today who are driving all day on their motorbikes, swapping at swap stations, and then cooking on their batteries with energy-efficient induction cookstoves,” Spencer says. “And then repeating the cycle the next day.” Through word of mouth, the company has already built up a waitlist of thousands of people, ranging from families who want to use the motorcycles to take children to school and run errands to ride-hailing drivers who use motorcycles on Uber-like platforms. Today’s official launch opens up the first product to preorders in Kenya and India. The company is designed to scale rapidly, from building the product to charging infrastructure, and it plans to expand to other parts of Africa and Asia, Spencer says. While a small number of the motorcycles are already on roads, the company plans to deliver the next set of vehicles in 2026.
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E-Commerce
With Kendrick Lamars Not Like Us as a soundtrack, nurses at New Orleanss University Medical Center walked off the job for the third time, picketing along the citys Canal Street thoroughfare earlier this month. We will picket, shout, bargain, petition, and strike again, and again, and again until the nurses win the first contract! Terry Mogilles, an orthopedic trauma clinic nurse, told a rapt crowd on May 1. The crowd comprised about 100 nurses and their supporters, with many of the nurses wearing scrubs or red shirts with white lettering reading We Will Strike for Our Patients! Mogilles and roughly 600 University Medical Center nurses voted to unionize with National Nurses United in December 2023. They are in their 16th month of union representation but say their employer is stalling on a contract that would actually improve their jobs. (Disclosure: National Nurses United is a funder of Capital & Main.) Observers say nurses may be waiting even longer. On average, healthcare unions go around 17 months before obtaining first contracts. Today, the nurses not only have to overcome their employers resistance but also the downstream effects of the Trump administrations policy changes. In November, University Medical Center Management Corp. filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, blaming the union for delays in negotiations. Workers say it is UMC that is delaying, and LCMC, the parent corporation for UMC and one of only two hospital administrators in the city, declined Capital & Mains request for comment. * * * Nurses at University Medical Center are running up against a systemic flaw facing most newly organized workersmade worse by the current presidential administration, said Margaret Poydock, senior policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute. While the National Labor Relations Act mandates that employers must bargain in good faith, the law does not enforce a timeline on negotiations; more than half of all newly organized unions take over a year to get a contract, and the average as of 2022 was 465 days. Theres also a built-in incentive for anti-union employers to delay first contracts: One year after workers win union recognition, they can vote to dissolve their union. A long delay can enable employers to restart union-busting efforts. There are not really legal penalties, said Poydock, because the National Labor Relations Board cannot fine employers for prolonging negotiations. Furthermore, said Poydock, in the case of unions who believe that their employer is not bargaining in good faith, The only legal recourse workers have is through the board. However, the Trump administration has thrown the National Labor Relations Board into turmoil. One week after his inauguration, Trump fired the Joe Biden-appointed NLRB chair, Gwynne Wilcox, leaving the five-member board with just two members. The agency cannot issue decisions without a quorum of three members, giving reluctant employers even less incentive to bargain in good faith, knowing cases brought against them can be prolonged. While Wilcox has sued for reinstatement, the case has bounced between judges and is still in litigation. If Wilcox loses her case, the board may remain without a quorum; if Wilcox wins reinstatement, Trump can appoint two more members to the board, creating a conservative majority. That might make workers more hesitant to bring cases to the board, because they potentially will not have a ruling that favors them, said Poydock. President Trump also signed an executive order gutting the Federal Mediation & Conciliation Service (FMCS), cutting its staff from 220 to about a dozen and eliminating [the FMCS and six other agencies] to the minimum presence and function required by law. The service helped workers and companies reach contract agreements. Though National Nurses United did not comment on whether it planned to seek FMCS involvement, without protections from the National Labor Relations Board or support from FMCS, unions like the one at University Medical Center have fewer optionsoutside of strikesto force their employers to negotiate with them. * * * New Orleans nurses say they walked out because workplace conditions have failed to improve. The union has struck twice before, in October 2024 and February 2025. Both times, management locked them out, costing LCMC a reported $2 million per day, or a total of $16 million. In the months since, nurses say workplace violence has continued, pay is not sufficient, and University Medical Center has moved too slowly on contract negotiations. We had a number of nurses who were hurt on the job by patients; the potential for danger went up instead of going down, said Mogilles. Nurses also say there have been several instances in which guns have been found in the hospital, and that chronic understaffing has continued, endangering patients and nurses alike. Negotiations over pay have also contributed to the strike. Nurses say University Medical Center officials took eight months to respond to a seven-page wage proposal nurses had submitted last July. The hospital response, they say, was one paragraph long. Umer Mukhtar, an ICU nurse and bargaining team member, said the hospitals delaye response was a very strong motivation for us to come out and picket again. Mukhtar said retention at the hospital is poor, noting that eight nurses left his ICU in the past month. They [LCMC Health] want to keep [telling] lies while they buy time to union-bust and hopefullyfor themdecertify the union, he said. Theyre trying to make [the majority of nurses think that] the union is not an effective bargaining tool. On Canal Streets rain-washed stage, Mogilles earned riotous applause as she closed out her speech. Asking politely does not work! she said. LCMC, you not like us! And were so glad we not like you. By Jesse Baum, Capital & Main This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.
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When the annual U.N. climate conference descends on the small Brazilian rainforest city of Belém in November 2025, it will be tempting to focus on the drama and disunity among major nations. Only 21 countries had even submitted their updated plans for managing climate change by the 2025 deadline required under the Paris Agreement. The U.S. is pulling out of the agreement altogether. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the likely absence ofor potential stonewalling bya U.S. delegation will take up much of the oxygen in the negotiating hall. You can tune them out. Trust me, Ive been there. As chair of the California Air Resources Board for nearly 20 years, I attended the annual conferences from Bali in 2007 to Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, in 2023. That included the exhilarating success in 2015, when nearly 200 nations committed to keep global warming in check by signing the Paris Agreement. In recent years, however, the real progress has been outside the rooms where the official U.N. negotiations are held, not inside. In these meetings, the leaders of states and provinces talk about what they are doing to reduce greenhouse gases and prepare for worsening climate disasters. Many bilateral and multilateral agreements have sprung up like mushrooms from these side conversations. This week, for example, the leaders of several state-level governments are meeting in Brazil to discuss ways to protect tropical rainforests that restore ecosystems while creating jobs and boosting local economies. What states and provinces are doing now The real action in 2025 will come from the leaders of states and provinces, places like Pastaza, Ecuador; Acre and Pará, Brazil; and East Kalimantan, Indonesia. While some national political leaders are backing off their climate commitments, these subnational governments know they have to live with increasing fires, floods, and deadly heat waves. So, theyre stepping up and sharing advice for what works. State, province, and local governments often have jurisdiction over energy generation, land-use planning, housing policies, and waste management, all of which play a role in increasing or reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Their leaders have been finding ways to use that authority to reduce deforestation, increase the use of renewable energy, and cap and cut greenhouse gas emissions that are pushing the planet toward dangerous tipping points. They have teamed up to link carbon markets and share knowledge in many areas. In the U.S., governors are working together in the U.S. Climate Alliance to fill the vacuum left by the Trump administrations efforts to dismantle U.S. climate policies and programs. Despite intense pressure from fossil fuel industry lobbyists, the governors of 22 states and two territories are creating policies that take steps to reduce emissions from buildings, power generation, and transportation. Together, they represent more than half the U.S. population and nearly 60% of its economy. Tactics for fighting deforestation In Ecuador, provinces like Morona Santiago, Pastaza, and Zamora Chinchipe are designing management and financing partnerships with Indigenous territories for protecting more than 4 million hectares of forests through a unique collaboration called the Plataforma Amazonica. Brazilian states, including Mato Grosso, have been using remote-sensing technologies to crack down on illegal land clearing, while states like Amapá and Amazonas are developing community-engaged bioeconomy plans (think increased jobs through sustainable local fisheries and producing super fruits like acaí). Acre, Pará, and Tocantins have programs that allow communities to sell carbon credits for forest preservation to companies. Global Forest Watch uses satellite data to track forest cover change. Green shows areas with at least 30% forest cover in 2000. Pink is forest loss from 2003 to 2023. Blue is forest gain from 2000 to 2020. [Image: Global Forest Watch, CC BY] States in Mexico, including Jalisco, Yucatán, and Oaxaca, have developed sustainable supply chain certification programs to help reduce deforestation. Programs like these can increase the economic value in some of foods and beverages, from avocados to honey to agave for tequila. There are real signs of success: Deforestation has dropped significantly in Indonesia compared with previous decades, thanks in large part to provincially led sustainable forest management efforts. In East Kalimantan, officials have been pursuing policy reforms and working with plantation and forestry companies to reduce forests destruction to protect habitat for orangutans. Its no wonder that philanthropic and business leaders from many sectors are turning to state and provincial policymakers, rather than national governments. These subnational governments have the ability to take timely and effective action. Working together to find solutions Backing many of these efforts to slow deforestation is the Governors Climate and Forests Task Force, which Californias then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger helped launch in 2008. It is the worlds only subnational governmental network dedicated to protecting forests, reducing emissions, and making peoples lives better across the tropics. Today, the task force includes 43 states and provinces from 11 countries. They cover more than one-third of the worlds tropical forests. That includes all of Brazils Legal Amazon region, more than 85% of the Peruvian Amazon, 65% of Mexicos tropical forests, and more than 60% of Indonesias forests. From a purely environmental perspective, subnational governments and governors must balance competing interests that do not always align with environmentalists ideals. Pará state, for example, is building an 8-mile (13 kilometer) road to ease traffic that cuts through rainforest. Californias investments in its Lithium Valley, where lithium used to make batteries is being extracted near the Salton Sea, may result in economic benefits within California and the U.S., while also generating potential environmental risks to air and water quality. Each governor has to balance the needs of farmers, ranchers and other industries with protecting the forests and other ecosystems, but those in the task force are finding pragmatic solutions. The week of May 19 to 23, 2025, two dozen or more subnational leaders from Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Indonesia, and elsewhere are gathering in Rio Branco, Brazil, for a conference on protecting tropical rainforests. Theyll also be ironing out some important details for developing what they call a new forest economy for protecting and restoring ecosystems while creating jobs and boosting economies. Protecting tropical forest habitat while also creating jobs and economic opportunities is not easy. In 2023, data show the planet was losing rainforest equivalent to 10 soccer fields per minute, and had lost more than 7% since 2000. But states and cities are taking big steps while many national governments cant even agree on which direction to head. Its time to pay attention more to the states. Mary Nichols is a distinguished counsel for the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the University of California, Los Angeles. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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