Given that it’s just possible that 2024 will be a difficult year, I’m committed to occasionally finding good news to parse—for my benefit, if not for yours. Hence today we’re going to talk about batteries, which I realize sounds somewhat spinach-y. But bear with me, and see if you’re not charged up by the end.

In 1900, about a third of cars in America were powered by batteries. But, as a comprehensive new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute makes clear, there was a problem: the energy density—the amount of energy carried per pound—was too low: a car could go 40 or 50 miles on a charge. Gasoline, by contrast, was a great store of energy: you could put 400 or 500 miles worth of it in a tank. True, it was highly flammable, created air pollution, and (as we later found out) raised the temperature of the earth, but energy density carried the day. And really, no one much bothered to try and improve batteries for most of the 20th century until—in Japan and the U.S.—consumer electronics began to create demand. It really wasn’t practical to figure out a gas-powered calculator, and so innovation got to work, eventually sweeping past Duracells and Everreadys to give us batteries (mostly based on lithium) so energy-dense that they began to be practical for cars.

We’ve now reached the point that, last month, a Chinese automaker—he’s sometimes called Asia’s Elon Musk, though that seems like an undeserved insult—drove his company’s flagship model 600 miles on a single charge, besting Tesla’s 405-mile Model S range.

And the point of the RMI report is that this kind of progress is only going to continue, because

Indeed, as the report makes clear, every time we double battery deployment, we increase the energy density of batteries by 18 percent, and we cut the cost by 19 percent. And there is a lot of doubling going on, as this Bloomberg chart makes clear:

You might have questions. Like...

#Could we possibly build enough factories to produce batteries to meet this demand? And the answer, apparently, is yes. Check this out:

In fact, the authors of the RMI report describe this as the most intense industrial buildout since the start of World War II when America converted its manufacturing base to war production. I described that remarkable stretch in an article eight years ago in the New Republic, when there was just one of these gigafactories under construction in the U.S. An engineer named Tom Solomon, who had built a huge Intel chip factory in Arizona helped me with the math. He started by looking at SolarCity, a clean-energy company that is currently building the nation’s biggest solar panel factory in Buffalo. “They’re calling it the giga-factory,” Solomon says, “because the panels it builds will produce one gigawatt worth of solar power every year.” Using the SolarCity plant as a rough yardstick, Solomon calculated that America needs 295 solar factories of a similar size to defeat climate change—roughly six per state—plus a similar effort for wind turbines.

So—this battery effort (which of course allows........

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