CES 2024 Dispatch: Surprise! It's a sustainability show
From electrification to carbon capture, green means go for the tech industry.
CES has been many things over the many years I’ve been going (this last visit was my, heaven help me, 22nd spin around the show floor). It’s been a gadget show, a TV show, it’s been dead, dead, and dead again, it’s been a car show and a deal-making show and it was even digital that one time.
But this year, even though AI was ostensibly the theme of the whole darn thing, CES 2024 was a stealth sustainability show.
Not all of it was stealth, to be clear. Sustainability was a big part of the messaging from CTA, the trade organization that puts on CES, but technically speaking, there wasn’t a hall or a dedicated conference track around climate tech.
There were, however, nearly three dozen conference sessions about topics ranging from battery technology to the innovation economy to green AI to sustainable package design to the transformation of motorsports (I’m quite sorry I missed that one). The CTA itself announced a new circularity initiative to encourage more voluntary recycling, repair, and reuse of electronics.
And then there was the actual show. Hopefully, you already saw my newsletter from last week about the Supernal EVTOL concept reveal and the potential for these electrified flying cars and taxis to make a big dent in electric mobility. More on that in a bit.
Major exhibitors like Panasonic and Bosch turned their entire show presence into green messaging. Panasonic’s booth was all about its solar and home battery products, energy-efficiency, and highlighting the company’s Green Impact initiative. Its show announcements included a sustainable plastic alternative called “kinari” and a tiny little shaver made out of renewable sea minerals.
Panasonic even created a digital booth for people who didn’t attend the show (a harbinger of a future convention, perhaps?), and rewarded people who completed its online quest by planting trees on their behalf.
Bosch, for its part, doubled down on hydrogen and energy efficiency, including announcing new heat pumps, water heaters, and tools to precisely manage battery health for fleet managers. Its show floor booth was all-in on green energy messaging.

And I won’t say the word “sustainability” popped up as often as “AI,” but this eMarketer piece on CES 2024 booth design notes the overall vibe of greenery, less-is-more booth designs, and a focus on eco-messaging across the board. Oh, and then there was this innocuously named hall:
This year’s CES featured a whole new exhibition hall called “Vehicle Tech and Advanced Mobility.” That’s a slightly cool name if you’re into that sort of thing (I am), but gave no hint of the actual wonders that lay through this door, including EHang’s flying frickin Ferrari. I mean, why not, right?

The West Hall offered electric motorcycles, the aforementioned EVTOL, electric bulldozers, excavators, and machines I can’t even name, an electric plumbing van, electric trucks, a couple of different Polestars (the 3 and the 4), what I think might have been a giant electric yacht of some sort … honestly, it was like an electrification wonderland, including the subject of this week’s Everybody in the Pool podcast, the Pebble all-electric travel-trailer (which doubles as sort of an ADU/home battery backup system when it’s not in use for glamping with a capital G).

Here’s a gallery of but some of the rando electric vehicles I saw in my stroll through the West Hall of Wonders:









Oh, I forgot the motorcycle, and we haven’t even made it to Eureka Park yet, the startup zone of CES that was absolutely littered with climate tech, from battery startups to hydrogen infrastructure to fruit sanitizer spray to reduce food waste to cow health wearables to more heat pumps and fancy photovoltaic cells.




Honestly, I was worried as I headed to Las Vegas that I’d be scrounging for climate tech. But I’m sure I missed more than I saw, and the takeaway for me is pretty clear: this is where the money’s going, this is where the innovation is happening, and this is the industry of the future—and it all makes me feel a little more confident that we’ll have one!