Electric Cars Have Hit an Inflection Point

This is an excerpt from The Atlantic’s climate newsletter, The Weekly Planet. Subscribe today.

One theme of this newsletter is that the world’s physical infrastructure will have to massively change if we want to decarbonize the economy , which the United Nations has said is necessary to avoid the worst effects of the climate crisis. This won’t be as simple as passing a carbon tax or a clean-electricity mandate: Wires will have to be strung; solar farms will have to be erected; industries will have to be remade. And although that kind of change canmost of the work to make it happen.