Growth of EV Sales

Worldwide, about 6.75 EV's were sold in 2021, which was more than twice the 2020 total of 3.3 million, which itself was a 60% increase over 2019's total of 2 million. In the first quarter of 2022, 2 million units were sold, almost twice the 1.1 million sold in Q1 2021. 

 

No one knows how quickly EV sales will increase in the future, and no one I've seen is predicting that sales will continue to double every year -- but just for fun, just for the moment, let's pretend they will. Double 2022's global total of 6.75 million would be 13.5 million in 2023, 27 million in 2024, 54 million in 2025, 108 million in 2026 and hold it, hold it, because as far as I know, there have never been as many as 108 million motor vehicles sold in any calendar year. If I've got it right, the worldwide record so far was under 80 million, in 2017, and few if any people are predicting as many as 108 by 2026.

I'm sure that a lot of you, including many hardcore EV advocates, are yelling at your screens about now, saying that I'm an idiot and that 100% growth of EV sales every year is impossible. 

Yes, I'm an idiot, you've got no argument from me there. Where we disagree is in the use of this term "impossible." I've long believed that it's an overused term, and that many more things are possible than most of us tend to think most of the time.

The growth of the EV sector over the past couple of years has happened in spite of COVID, in spite of supply chain issues -- and in spite of very, very few EV's having been sold outside of China, Europe and North America. Lots of vehicles were sold in Central and South America, Africa, India. Very, very few EV's. 

About 90% of recent EV sales have been in China and Europe. Why? It's very simple: because laws in China and Europe said that higher percentages of vehicles had to be EV's. Because people decided that EV sales were going to grow.

What's the biggest obstacle to the growth of solar and wind power to run all these EV's, real present-day one plus the imaginary future ones? It's the legal situation again, with the fossil fuel industry and so-called "utilities" hindering the growth of solar and wind, and thus the death of fossil fuels. 

From one perspective it all seems very complicated, and it's true that there are a lot of moving parts here, and that EV sales are just a part of it: exposing the ties between fossil fuels and government, building up solar and wind, smartening up the grid, improving public transportation, encouraging people to walk more and eat less meat, afforestation, re-forestation, rebuilding wetlands, etc etc. Yes, you could say that it's complicated.

From another perspective, though, it's as simple as anything could ever be: do we want to save our own lives? How much do we want it? Do we want it bad enough, or not?

I'm not going to save the world all by myself, one isolated autistic weirdo with a silly blog. How many people are working on these things, how many will join them? People with the brains to make better batteries and smarter grids? People with power, people in positions to pass laws that get more EV's and less ICE vehicles built, laws that speed the growth of solar and wind and kill off fossil fuels, laws which improve education so that everyone is better equipped to improve all of these things? People with the patience and eloquence and intelligence to explain, better than I can, why all of these things are necessary and how important they are?

You're Not Going To Be Elected President In 2016, Bernie. But You Can Still Be A Hero

You're still saying, every chance you get, that you have a chance at winning the Democratic nomination. You don't have snowball's chance in Hell. And if you really don't know this, if you really can't do even that much math -- well, then I'm wasting my time trying to talk to you, and this post is strictly for the benefit of other people.

But assuming that you actually can do the math and that you realize that Hillary will be the nominee, why do you keep acting as if you don't realize it? The thing is, there are a lot of your supporters -- nobody knows for sure how many -- who can't do the math. Are you doing them any service by feeding their delusions?

Over and over, you say that your #1 priority is to ensure that Trump is defeated in the fall. So act on that. You can do more than any other single person to swing votes away from Trump and to Hillary, by dropping out of the election NOW and doing all that you can to persuade your supporters that they must vote for Hillary.

You know Hillary personally, you know she's not history's greatest monster and not a Republican in disguise. You know how close most of her positions are to yours and how far to the Left both of you are from the Republicans. But a lot of your supporters, including a lot of very noisy ones, clearly don't know any of this, and they need to hear it from the only person they would possibly listen to about Hillary: you.

You can go down in history as someone who united a nation in a time of great peril, the peril being the possibility of a Trump Presidency. Oh, you'd be such a hero. And the movement you've been in will go on, but with real power, with many of its people in office, getting things done, all clearly due to you. You will have moved the Democratic party a long way back to the Left, and people will love you for it. They will remember.

The thing is, of course, that the longer you wait to drop out and work to unite people around the goal of stopping Trump, the less your impact will be. The more time goes by, the more people will realize that Hillary has won the nomination -- and not just won it, but won it by miles and miles. The 2016 Democratic Presidential campaign has been very exciting, but it was never close, except in the deluded minds of some of your followers. That delusion is fading. The longer you stay in the race, the more you look like a nut, and the more the people who talk about you being elected President in 2016 look like nuts. In a socially-responsible society, nuts are looked after to make sure they're not hurt, but in the positions of power in politics and other practical affairs, they're shunned. They're not allowed to take over, with very few and disastrous exceptions like Hitler and Trump.

The real Stop Trump campaign, ever since he won the Republican nomination, has been Hillary's campaign, and Hillary's campaign will get on with taking care of business, with you or without you. With you joining it now -- right now -- it could be a juggernaut, not only winning the White House in a landslide, but also winning Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, and flipping Mayoral offices and City Councils and judgeships from Republican to Democrat, from sea to shining sea, so that a Democratic President and all those other Democratic elected officials will actually be able to pass laws and appropriate money and get things done, things like repairing the infrastructure and expanding Social Security, and restoring funding to education and reducing tuition costs, and converting the US to wind and solar and other clean energy -- you know: all of that long line of things which Hillary supports just as much as you do, as do the vast majority of Democratic office holders and candidates for office, and Democratic voters.

Hillary is going to take care of business with or without your help. I don't think you can actually cost her the election and get Trump elected -- the very opposite of what you claim is your #1 priority -- but you certainly can make the Presidential election, and all of those other elections, much closer than they need to be. The sooner you get on board, the closer the expansion of the social safety net and the restoration of the infrastructure and the conversion to clean energy, and all of the other things that you and I and Hillary and almost all Democrats want, will come.

But the longer you wait, the less power you have here. The more you insist on behaving like a nut who doesn't know when he's been defeated, the more people will treat you like a nut, and the less of a factor you will be in November.

Unless you actually go full retard and 3rd party. You're acting nuttier and nuttier, but I still don't think you're that far gone just yet.

Assuming that eventually you're going to be supporting Hillary and Democrats in general, the sooner you start, the more significant your support will be. If you wait too long, as I said, I don't think it will actually mean that Trump beats Hillary, but it could mean that the House and the Senate stay Republican, and that a lot of the state and local offices stay Republican as well. And then, what will you have accomplished? You will have thrown a huge temper tantrum, and because of that tantrum we will get much less of what both we Democrats and you want, than if you do what politicians have to do very often: compromise in order to get most of what they want, instead of none of it.

Time is of the essence. The longer you wait to drop out and endorse Hillary, the more you will be ignored by sensible people who have to get on with this -- beating Trump -- with our without your help. The longer you wait, the more you will leave us only with the option to ignore you.