Don’t Fall for the Externality Dodge: Corporate Greed is Responsible for Climate Change Not You!​​

The Interruption

Sales of electric cars peaked in the early 1910s. Then the market collapsed inside a single decade.

Four forces converged.

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The first was petroleum. The Spindletop gusher in Texas in 1901, the East Texas field, and the Middle Eastern discoveries beginning in Iran in 1908 flooded the American economy with cheap, energy-dense liquid fuel at exactly the moment gasoline vehicles most needed a cost advantage. The second was road-building. Improved highway systems meant longer trips became possible, and battery range at thirty to fifty kilometers per charge became a real constraint. The third was Charles Kettering's 1912 invention of the electric self-starter, which removed the hand-crank hazard that had been one of the internal combustion engine's biggest drawbacks. The fourth was Ford. Henry Ford's 1908 introduction of the Model T and his 1913 moving assembly line brought the price of a gasoline car down to two hundred and sixty dollars by 1925 — roughly a third the price of a comparable electric vehicle.

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By 1908, gasoline taxis had been introduced in New York. By 1910, the electric cabs were out of service. By 1914, electric vehicles had already lost nearly all of their U.S. market share. The last electric cars limped along into the 1920s and then vanished. The Hartford GeVeCo battery-swap service was discontinued in 1924. The three hundred electric-vehicle manufacturers of 1912 became zero.

By the time the Great Depression arrived, the electric vehicle had been effectively erased from American life.  

The next serious American electric-vehicle production run would not happen until 1996, with GM's EV1 — a program General Motors then killed in 2003 and physically crushed most of the vehicles from. 

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What This Cost 

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The internal combustion engine has led the way in driving greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere and the extinction of increasing numbers of land, air, and aquatic species. Transportation is now the single largest source of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for roughly twenty-eight percent of the national total. Cumulative global CO2 emissions from petroleum combustion since 1900 now approach four hundred fifty gigatons. Every one of those gigatons was avoidable if the market that existed in 1900 had continued its trajectory instead of being terminated. 

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This is the human cost. It is also, and this is the point of the chapter, an engineering cost with a specific and calculable size. 

Where Would the Electric Car Be Today? 

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The answer requires two documented technology-improvement problems. 

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The first is slow development of battery specific energy — the fundamental physics that determines how far a vehicle can go on a given weight of battery. Battery specific energy has improved at roughly three to four percent per year over the past century of real-world electrochemistry when it has been improved at all. That is far slower than Moore's Law for semiconductors, which corresponds to transistor density doubling roughly every two years — an annual rate of about thirty-five to forty percent. But it is real, sustained, and empirically observable.

The second is Wright's Law, first documented by Theodore Wright in 1936 in a paper on aircraft manufacturing costs. Wright's Law says that unit costs decline by a fixed percentage with every doubling of cumulative production. For lithium-ion batteries, that learning rate has been approximately nineteen to twenty-five percent per doubling. Battery pack prices fell about ninety percent between 2010 and 2024 — from approximately eleven hundred eighty dollars per kilowatt-hour in 2010 to one hundred fifteen dollars per kilowatt-hour in 2024 (BloombergNEF annual battery price survey). 

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Here is the reasonable extrapolation. 

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In 1912, Edison's nickel-iron battery delivered approximately twenty to twenty-five watt-hours per kilogram. In 2026, the best commercial lithium-ion cells deliver approximately three hundred watt-hours per kilogram, and pre-commercial solid-state prototypes are reaching four hundred. That is a fifteen-to-twentyfold real-world improvement over one hundred and fourteen years — roughly what you would expect from a two-and-a-half percent annual compounding rate, in a technology sector that was underfunded, deprioritized, and treated as marginal for approximately eighty of those one hundred and fourteen years. 

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If the 1912 trajectory had continued at the modest three-point-four percent annual battery specific-energy improvement rate that Ziegler & Trancik (2021, Energy & Environmental Science) documented for electrochemistry when investment is sustained, batteries in 2026 would deliver approximately eight hundred to one thousand watt-hours per kilogram — three to four times what today's best commercial cells achieve. That energy density would translate into vehicle ranges of fifteen hundred to two thousand miles per charge, curb weights half or less of today's electric cars, and cost profiles that would have made gasoline vehicles economically uncompetitive by roughly the 1960s. 

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If the Wright's Law learning rate observed for lithium-ion batteries — roughly twenty percent per production doubling — had been applied to a battery industry that never stopped scaling, instead of collapsing in the 1920s and having to be reinvented in the 1990s, cumulative battery production doublings between 1912 and 2026 could conservatively have delivered a price point of approximately ten to twenty dollars per kilowatt-hour in 2026 dollars. Today's best price is one hundred fifteen dollars per kilowatt-hour. A ten-dollar-per-kilowatt-hour battery pack means an eighty-kilowatt-hour electric vehicle carries roughly eight hundred dollars in battery cost, not nine thousand two hundred. Electric vehicles would be substantially cheaper than gasoline vehicles, not slightly more expensive – Without heating the planet toward extinction. 

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The infrastructure question would have been solved a century ago. The 1910-1924 Hartford GeVeCo battery-swap service already demonstrated the commercial viability of battery exchange stations. Extrapolate that model with a century of continuous refinement, and by 2026 there would be no meaningful difference between "refueling" an electric vehicle and refueling a gasoline vehicle. Standardized swap-ready battery formats would be as universal as the modern gas-pump nozzle – like swap-out propane cylinders you see in racks at gas stations. Home charging, fast charging, and station-swap would coexist as three parallel and mature refueling modalities. 

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And the climate cost would be dramatically lower. Rough estimates place transportation's contribution to atmospheric CO2 accumulation since 1900 at one hundred to one hundred fifty gigatons of CO2-equivalent — enough to make the difference between the climate we now inhabit and one substantially more habitable. 

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That is the cost of the century we lost. Not a rhetorical loss. A quantifiable, measurable, calculable one.

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Why The Electric Car Actually Failed — And Why It Matters For What Comes Next

The electric vehicle was not a technology that failed. It was a technology that was suppressed by the pricing power of a competing industry that discovered enormous petroleum reserves at exactly the moment gasoline vehicles overcame their two biggest handicaps: starting difficulty and cost. The three hundred electric-vehicle manufacturers of 1912 did not disappear because their product was worse. They disappeared because their competitor could sell fuel below its full social cost while the electric-vehicle industry was still trying to standardize its charging infrastructure. 

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Read that sentence again. It contains the pattern this book is written to warn against. 

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Every time a clean-energy technology emerges into a market dominated by fossil fuels, the same three forces line up against it.  

Fossil fuels can be sold below their full social cost because the atmosphere is a free waste sink and no one pays for the damage – until later.  

Fossil fuel infrastructure is already built, so switching costs favor incumbents. And the political economy of fossil fuels — refineries, pipelines, distribution networks, employment concentrations, campaign donors — organizes itself to defend the status quo at every point where policy could tilt the field. 

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The electric vehicle lost this fight in the 1910s. Solar power nearly lost it again in the 1970s and 1980s, when federal renewable-energy R&D funding was cut by roughly eighty-five percent in real terms between 1980 and 1989 — with solar-specific budgets falling by approximately ninety percent — and the U.S. solar industry, which invented the modern photovoltaic cell, ceded market leadership first to Japan and eventually to China. Direct atmospheric carbon removal is being asked to fight the same fight right now, in the 2020s. The 1980s wind industry, the 1990s fuel-cell industry, the 2000s enhanced geothermal industry — all of them faced the same market physics. 

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The consistent pattern: when a clean-energy technology approaches commercial viability, the fossil fuel industry does not compete on merit. It uses its political access, its price-dumping capacity, and its infrastructure lock-in to make sure the clean-energy technology never reaches the scale at which its learning curve would compete honestly. 

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The world is now retracing the innovation trajectory it abandoned in 1912. Global electric-car sales exceeded twenty million units in 2025 — one out of every four new cars sold worldwide. In 2026 that figure is projected to reach twenty-three million and twenty-eight percent of the global new-car market. In Norway, electric vehicles accounted for ninety-seven point six percent of new passenger-car registrations in the first half of 2026. China alone accounted for sixty-three percent of global EV sales in 2025, roughly thirteen million units. The global EV fleet now displaces approximately one point two million barrels of oil demand per day.

The United States, however, sits at only nine point five five percent EV share (BEV + PHEV + FCEV combined) of new light-duty vehicle sales in the first half of 2025, according to the Alliance for Automotive Innovation — a share that declined by 0.11 percentage points from the same period in 2024. The country that invented the electric taxi in 1897 has now fallen behind Europe, China, and every serious industrial competitor.