EVs are expected to become cheaper than internal combustion engine (ICE) cars as early as next year. The sequence points to Europe attaining EV pricing parity or below with ICE cars in 2024, China in 2025, North America in 2026, and India in 2027.

When did ICE car sales peak? In 2017 and flat through 2019 with sales falling since then. Meanwhile, EV sales are growing and are expected to increase 600% by 2030. What this means for Houston’s fossil fuel companies is a fall in oil demand by 1 million barrels per day for every year beginning with 2030. That’s how dramatic and disruptive this reversal in market share between ICE and EVs is expected to become.

What’s driving the change?

• The cost of batteries is dropping not because the materials are cheaper, but because of economies of scale among producers. At the same time, the batteries’ Kilowatt-hour (Kwh) output continues to increase the effective driving range for EVs.
• Government subsidies both current and in the future are continuing to support EV sales growth.
• Recharge infrastructure is expanding rapidly with governments. manufacturers and vendors expanding the network of charge stations in urban settings and along major road arteries.
• Public concerns about climate change are altering consumer preferences for acceptable transportation choices.
• Vehicle manufacturers are churning out new EV car models at a rapid rate. And for purchasers and lease fleet operators in the corporate world, a growing number, more than 100 global companies to date) are committed to 100% zero-emissions for their transportation and business operations as early as 2035 with a hard stop by no later than 2040.

The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a not-for-profit think tank focused on tackling climate change and its main contributor, the fossil fuel industry, is monitoring the exponential change happening within the car industry. RMI calls the coming EV transition the end of the ICE age. ICE refers to internal combustion engine-powered cars.

Working with RMI are many others including the Bezos Earth Fund, which has invested $10 billion in the fight against climate change. Kelly Levin, Chief of Science, Data and Systems Change at the Bezos Earth Fund states in a recent RMI press release, “Several large vehicle markets are proving it’s possible to quickly course-correct on fossil-fueled vehicle sales in favour of EVs.”

Other RMI partners describe the change as a tipping point bringing out rapid transformative change fueled by growing price parity, and strong government policies.

One of these is Simon Sharpe, Director of Economics for the Climate Champions Team and Policy Impact Lead at the University of Exeter’s EEIST project. He points to “strong policy” getting “the transition to electric vehicles started,” and continues, noting that “just because the transition is now gathering pace does not mean that any government should take its foot off the accelerator.”

The RMI forecasts that by 2030 EVs will predominate for car sales with larger vehicles like heavy trucks not going electric well into the 2030s.

Where was the motor vehicle industry in 2019? U.S. car sales that year were 4.2 million with a mere 90,000 EVs. In 2024, the latter number is expected to be over 2 million with global EV sales topping 18.5 million cars.

The only transportation category that will resist the transition is heavy trucks with U.S. sales forecasts at 40,000 in 2024.

And for those who drive hybrids like me, the RMI forecasts increasing growth but at a much slower pace than EVs. Hybrids still will find a market for rural consumers and in places where EV charging network infrastructure is sparse to non-existent.

A final note: It won’t just be the motor vehicle companies that will be course-correcting. Energy utilities will face tipping points of their own driven by government requirements for lower emissions and growing EV electrical demand.

A mean average rise means many days significantly hotter with the greatest extremes felt in cities where pavement and lack of forest cover exacerbate temperatures to the extreme. Even today mean temperatures, now 1.0 Celsius higher than the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, are making those places where the majority of humanity live and work, hotter and more uncomfortable.

What does a 1.5 Celsius temperature rise mean in reality?

Here are two examples. A 1.5 rise globally projects to an average rise of 4.4 Celsius (7.9 Fahrenheit) in the Arctic and 2.2 (approximately 4 Fahrenheit) in the Mediterranean basin according to the latest climate models.

What does a 2.0 Celsius temperature rise mean?

For the Arctic it translates to a rise of between 5.5 and 8 Celsius (9.9 and 14.4 Fahrenheit). And in the Mediterranean it increases average temperatures by 3.0 Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit).

Climatologists point out that the current 1.0 Celsius rise since the Industrial Revolution has already produced temperatures 2+ Celsius higher in the Arctic just in the last 15 years.

But that is only the half of it. Consider that mean temperatures get measured over both land and ocean. So the mean temperature rise of 2 Celsius translates to land temperature rises of as much as 6 Celsius (10.8 Fahrenheit). Imagine what that mean for those heat islands, the large urban cities I mentioned above? And all we are talking about so far is temperature changes. Along with the warmth other weather related phenomena will change. Think wind, precipitation, extreme weather events, storm surges.

No climate model to date is perfect.

Projections, such as those described above, may contain error factors. And current climate models don’t anticipate “tipping points” which could dramatically exacerbate the impact of rising temperatures.

If unfamiliar with the term tipping point popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in a recent book, it refers to a point in an evolving situation that leads to a change or new equilibrium. Climate change tipping points have happened in Earth’s geological past. The most recent example is the Ice Age of geological period known as the Pleistocene which began 2 to 3 million years ago and came to an inter-glacial warming period only in the last 20,000. Some climatologists believe that the warming we have added through human activity may push any potential Ice Age recurrence into a future as much as 100,000 years away.

Today the new tipping may be happening in the Arctic as sea ice declines and Greenland glaciers experience rapid melting.

In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year, scientists identified 37 other cases of potential tipping points all happening within the 2 Celsius climate model scenario. The scientists state that the question isn’t “if these things will occur” it is more “when they will occur.” The triggers include ocean, sea ice, alpine and continental glaciers, permafrost zones and land mass flora and fauna. One that we may see sooner than later is a shut down of the existing North Atlantic Ocean circulation pattern as Arctic and Greenland ice melt cools the waters off Europe. That’s just one abrupt change that could lead to a cascade of others.

All of the above points to the fact that we may be underestimating the amount of carbon dioxide emission reductions needed to keep the planet more accommodating to our present existence as well as that of the flora and fauna. Professor Andy Pitman, Director of ARCCSS, the Australian Research Centre for Climate System Science, states, “To keep extreme temperature changes over the Mediterranean below a 2 Celsius threshold, the cumulative emissions of CO2 would have to be restricted to 600 gigatons rather than the 850 gigatons currently estimated to keep global average temperatures increase below 2 Celsius.”

The image below states “1.5 C to stay alive.” Although life here on Earth can withstand a mean average temperature rise within that limit, the truth is the quality of that life will be far different from today. Humanity is at a tipping point where procrastination will lead to unforeseen consequences because as bad as the climate models predict the future, the reality may prove to be far less palatable.

If you are reading this I encourage you to circulate the contents, to show it to political leaders and business decision makers, and to consider the role you can play in reducing the carbon emissions that are impacting our present and the near  future.