Euan Gregor at the Ember energy think tank makes a novel argument: The adoption of electric vehicles has spread in a major way to the Global South and is no longer only a Chinese, European and American phenomenon. By EVs Ember means both hybrid and pure battery electric cars.

But it certainly is a Chinese phenomenon, since in that country nearly half of new car sales were electric this year. That is an incredible statistic.

Globally, Yale Climate Connections says, 25% of new car sales were electric of some sort. Road transportation, this site says, accounts for 12% of global carbon emissions.

When we say that people in the Global South are buying EVs hand over fist, alas, we aren’t saying that they are buying Chevy Bolts or Nissan Leafs or Teslas. They are mostly buying BYDs, Geelys, BWMs and other Chinese makes, which are 65% the price of a Tesla. Since automobile transportation will be electrified over the next 30 years, the country that makes all those EVs will become the industrial powerhouse of the 21st Century. Most of the growth in Chinese EV exports, Ember says, has come in countries outside the relatively wealthy 38 nations that belong to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Developmentnon (OECD).

Backward American capitalism has been captured by dirty petroleum interests and is like the horse-and-buggy companies of 1902, which laughed at Henry Ford’s Model T for a while before being put out of business by it. (They started by saying that automobiles were impractical because they would scare the horses).

The petroleum industry and the dirty oil countries are aware that China and Europe are electrifying transport, but they had pinned their hopes on a continued demand for internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEV) in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Ember is saying that that hope is a pipe dream (pun intended). Exhibit A: Ethiopia has banned the importation of gasoline cars.

Wang Chuanfu, the CEO of BYD, the largest EV company in the........

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