Every nation on Earth bans the internal combustion engine

Story: 2047 C.E. ???  |  Last updated: January 26, 2026

Note: This is an imagined future story, written as if a projected milestone has occurred. It is based on current trends and evidence, not confirmed events.

For the first time in history, every sovereign nation on Earth has committed in writing to ban the sale of new internal combustion engine vehicles — a moment that marks the formal end of fossil-fueled personal transportation as the global default. The Geneva Transport Accord of 2047 C.E. closed the final gaps in a legislative patchwork that had been building for three decades, bringing the last holdouts — several low-income nations in sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, and the Pacific — into a unified framework with phased timelines, technical assistance, and binding enforcement mechanisms.

Key projections that got us here

• ICE vehicle ban: Global EV market share hit 83% by 2040 C.E., exactly tracking IEA projections made in 2025 C.E. — making the political case for a universal ban almost self-evident by 2047 C.E.
• Battery prices: The cost of a battery pack fell from roughly $115 per kilowatt-hour in 2024 C.E. to under $40 by 2035 C.E., making EVs cheaper to manufacture than ICE vehicles in every major market segment.
• Policy momentum: By 2030 C.E., 58 nations had formal phase-out timelines on record. By 2038 C.E., that number had grown to over 140, with only a handful of nations still uncommitted.

How the last holdouts joined

The political story of 2047 C.E. is less about the nations that led and more about the ones that finally followed.

By the early 2040s C.E., the economics had already done most of the work. New combustion-engine vehicles had become more expensive to produce than comparable EVs in virtually every segment. Insurance costs for ICE vehicles had risen sharply as climate-linked risk modeling matured. Several major auto manufacturers had voluntarily stopped producing ICE passenger cars entirely by 2042 C.E., citing demand collapse.

What remained was a governance problem. A cluster of roughly 30 nations — many of them small island states, land-locked developing economies, or conflict-affected countries — lacked the regulatory infrastructure, grid capacity, or domestic political consensus to formalize a ban. The Geneva Accord addressed this directly: wealthier nations and international financial institutions committed a pooled fund of $200 billion in technical and infrastructure support, with flexible compliance timelines ranging from 2050 C.E. to 2060 C.E. for the most constrained economies.

It is worth noting how far Africa’s engagement had traveled. In the mid-2020s C.E., Cabo Verde had been the only African nation with a formal ICE phase-out commitment. By 2047 C.E., 44 African countries had signed the Accord, many of them leapfrogging the infrastructure challenges that had slowed adoption in wealthier nations a generation earlier — drawing comparisons to how the continent had leapfrogged landline telephone infrastructure by moving directly to mobile networks.

What the data behind the ban looked like

The numbers that made this possible were already visible in 2025 C.E., when global EV sales topped 20 million units — a figure that had seemed ambitious just five years earlier. By 2047 C.E., annual EV sales exceeded 110 million, with combustion-engine new-car sales reduced to a rounding error.

China’s role was central. Chinese EV market share hit 96% of new light-vehicle sales by 2040 C.E., and Chinese manufacturers had become the dominant suppliers of affordable EVs and battery technology across South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Vietnam’s rise — from near-zero EV adoption in 2020 C.E. to 40% market share by mid-2025 C.E., driven by domestic manufacturer VinFast — had signaled early that emerging markets could move faster than conventional wisdom assumed.

The renewable energy transformation running in parallel mattered enormously. As renewables came to represent nearly half of global power capacity in the late 2020s C.E., the argument that EVs simply shifted emissions from tailpipe to power plant lost its force in most of the world.

The milestone’s meaning — and its limits

Historians of technology are already calling the Geneva Accord a symbolic capstone rather than an inflection point. The real shift happened years earlier, when EVs became the obvious economic choice. What 2047 C.E. adds is universality — a shared legal commitment that no nation officially endorses a combustion-powered future.

The Accord does not cover existing vehicles already on the road, and the global fleet of ICE cars — still numbering in the hundreds of millions — will take decades to retire fully. Air quality in lower-income urban areas, where older vehicles concentrate, remains a serious public health challenge. Enforcement in fragile states is an open question. The transition to EVs also raises unresolved concerns about mining impacts on Indigenous and rural communities near lithium, cobalt, and nickel deposits.

Still, the Accord closes a chapter that opened with Karl Benz’s first gasoline-powered carriage in 1885 C.E. The internal combustion engine transformed the world — and reshaped the climate in the process. The question now is how fast the fleet turns over, and whether the grid, the mining supply chain, and the political will to manage the transition fairly can keep pace.

Advocates who have spent careers pushing for this moment are noting, with some satisfaction, that the global EV transition followed roughly the same curve as the decline of the horse-drawn carriage — and happened in a fraction of the time anyone expected. The IEA’s long-range forecasts, which once seemed optimistic, turned out to be conservative.

For coastal nations already living with the consequences of a warmer world, news of the Accord carries particular weight. Efforts like Ghana’s expansion of marine protected areas have shown that environmental stewardship and economic development can move together — and the Geneva Accord makes a similar argument at global scale.

The International Renewable Energy Agency estimates that the full phase-out of ICE vehicles, combined with the ongoing decarbonization of the grid, will reduce global transport-sector CO₂ emissions by more than 70% relative to 2020 C.E. levels by the time the last flexible-timeline countries complete their transitions in the 2050s C.E.

That number will not be enough on its own. But it is a number that was not on the table at all when the first EV policy commitments were made.

Read more

For more on this story, see: IEA Global EV Outlook

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Ghana expands its marine protected area at Cape Three Points
• Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
• The Good News for Humankind archive on clean energy

About this article

• 🤖 This article is AI-generated, based on a framework created by Peter Schulte.
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