Challenges with supply chains and an incredibly slow production ramp-up of new electric vehicles continues but General Motors is still having a very good year financially and expects that to continue. During an investor day presentation in New York this week, CFO Paul Jacobson announced higher guidance for 2022 free cash flow and profits. GM also reconfirmed that it expects its lineup of electric vehicles to be profitable by 2025, in part based on reducing cell costs for lithium-ion batteries.

There are a lot of new EV battery plants popping up around the U.S. but none, not even Tesla’s, produce the key components that make them work: cathodes and anodes. That’s about to change. Tesla cofounder JB Straubel says Redwood Materials, his Nevada startup, locked in a deal worth billions of dollars to provide cathodes and anode materials for lithium-ion batteries Panasonic will use at its new Kansas plant. Importantly, they’ll be made with some recycled materials Redwood generates from used batteries and electronics.

Earlier this week, the United Nations estimated that the world’s population just hit 8 billion people. That’s just 11 years after the global population hit 7 billion. The Earth’s population hit 4 billion people in 1974 – meaning it took less than 50 years for the population to double. In just 48 years, the world population has doubled in size, jumping from four to eight billion. Of course, humans are not equally spread throughout the planet, and countries take all shapes and sizes. The visualizations in this article aim to build context on how the eight billion people are distributed around the world.

That said, that rate of growth isn’t expected to continue. The U.N. estimates that the rate of growth has started to slow down, and is only expected to hit about 10.4 billion people by the end of the century. And that growth will be concentrated primarily in about 8 countries, while the rest of the world sees lower rates of childbirth coupled with aging populations. Thanks to advances in medicine, the proportion of the population aged over 65 will rise from about 10% now to 16% in the year 2050. Based on U.N. estimates, India is likely to surpass China as the world’s most populous country next year. The two countries combined collectively include about 2.8 billion people – over a third of the planet's population.