Eight years is lots of time to convert ICE to EV production. Also to build lots of Gigafactory. No shortage of lithium. Just have to open mines.
Air travel is not fungible with vehicle travel.
The problem isn't the lithium, it's the logistics of building that many factories in that short a time. The equivalent of 100 more Gigafactories needs to be built at a price tag of around $1 trillion. That's $125 billion a year for 8 years. Who is going to foot that tab?
And that just builds the factories. It's probably going to take another trillion to build out the infrastructure to support all those cars.
Throwing $250 billion a year at the problem for most of a decade will probably require governments to get involved and while commitment may vary from country to country, the US is definitely not interested in that kind of investment right now.
Getting all production switched over to EVs is also just the first step. There are lots of older cars out there. In the US, the average age of cars on the road is 11 years, that means half the US fleet is older than 11 years. A large percentage of those people driving cars older than 11 years don't have the money to buy anything newer. Without some kind of major incentive to replace their old car, they will be driving the ICE cast offs from people who have converted to EVs. The overall fleet will get cheaper, but the poorer people will still be driving ICE for a long time to come.
This article is a pie in the sky dream. The logistics of reality makes the adoption curve much longer.
It's all doable. There are no technological or scientific barriers that need to be crossed before it becomes possible. 20 years ago before li-ion batteries became as good as they are now, it would have been impossible to base an electric future on the tech in the EV1, even if Chevron didn't mess with the patents for nickel-metal-hydride battery tech.
The pieces of tech needed to make this happen are here now, it's just the logistics of making it happen in one of the largest segments of the economies of every industrialized country is huge and isn't going to happen quickly.
Tesla is showing the world how to scale up this tech. Without Tesla pretty much proving that the Model 3 could be brought to market (not there yet, but very close) in volume at an attractive price point, nobody would take it on. Ultimately it will be consumer demand that drives the switch. The other car companies will get serious when their customers start demanding electric cars. Tesla has already done that in the European luxury car market which is why the European luxury car makers are taking Tesla the most serious right now. They can see Tesla moving down market and it will eat their bread and butter products like it ate their high end products.
The rest of the car industry is unwilling to learn the lesson from the Europeans and are continuing to predict the imminent demise of Tesla. Bob Lutz was on CNBC a few days ago predicting Tesla was toast any day now. You'd think someone who had been a CEO would know something about the difference between gross and net profits, but GM did go bankrupt on his watch too.
Demand will likely be way ahead of the ability of the industry to deliver though. Right now demand for non-Tesla EVs is soft because they are not very compelling as cars. But if the ones that don't start making compelling EVs when their customers start asking for Tesla-like EVs will go out of business.