..., so it is perfectly possible that ICE cars will become superclean and EV may not be needed just yet, who really knows what tomorrow will bring?
So, we just wait and see if that happens, or doesn't, do we, meantime sitting on our thumbs? Don't you get the clash between saying "possible ... will become" (conditional future tense) and "may not be needed just yet" (present tense)? We need solutions now, not after 20 years of further research, procrastination and sticking our heads in the sand. Do you have a basis for that "possibility" of superclean ICE cars, or is this just "all things are possible" wishful thinking? It's possible that next year I will get "A pony and the moon on stick." but I ain't gonna hold my breath.
Really, I find it very frustrating that a man who seems intelligent to me seems so wedded to wishful thinking in place of pragmatic realism.
As BD says, and I've been saying for years, what we've really got wrong is the expectation of cheap consequence free travel, and structuring the world so that it is a necessity (e.g. out of town supermarkets in place of local shops, commuting 20 miles twice a day instead of walking to a local place of work). Restructuring the last 60 years of socio-geographic change is going to be as much, if not more, of a struggle as weaning people off the idea that every household can have one or more cars and use them whenever they like or the idea that they can jump on a plane for a cheap weekend break in Barcelona. Frankly the whole EV versus ICE thing is just a sideshow.
SOAPBOX: 
I never suggested that EV isn't the way to go. Of course it is;
we simply cannot go on with the mindset that burning stuff to do what we want is the way to progress as a species. What I'm saying is that the only reason we're actually giving it any of this "reasonable consideration" right now is because Big Oil and their associates have figured out how to make as much or more money from EV as we do it now than by distributing gasoline to every household so they can burn it in a rolling firepit.
This is because it is easier and cheaper to pipe oil & CNG to centralized, clustered locations so it can be burned for electricity, then distribute that over existing infrastructure, plus the multiple levels of losses therein combined with the ability to burn less refined oil actually mean more of the raw product gets used in one shot, as opposed to re-refining and distributing oodles of kinds of different fuel products.
It is no accident that one of the biggest new investors in corn production right now is not a food producer, but rather a consortium of Big Energy money; even the attempt at shifting to E10-E85 vehicles still puts money in their pockets rather than taking it away. The only people who don't benefit from that investment are... surprise, surprise, small family farms.
The expectation of consequence-free individual travel is a byproduct of our sick, twisted pyramid socioeconomic structure, not the other way around. Human beings by nature tend to congregate in small clan-sized pockets, and begin to get uncomfortable in population centers large enough that the cloak of anonymity allows ne'er-do-wells to prey on them at will.
It is only the insane demands of modern commerce... wherein merely great profit-investment ratios are no longer acceptable, but which must rather be on the scale of usurious and gluttonous to be considered marginally acceptable,
that makes huge population centers necessary as people are the fuel for that cash refinery.Most people would prefer to live in a small or medium sized town. however, making that possible while providing the modern niceties would mean investing heavily in cellular distribution mechanisms as opposed to centralized distribution, which inherently means more expense up front and less egregious profits for those at the top of the pyramid.
It would in fact erode and destroy that very edifice, as cellular distribution means more of the profit is made by local interests and less is concentrated in centralized interests, and the climate of constant desperation in the struggle for the legal tender which fuels that pyramid structure would vaporize, returning most of humanity to their natural agrarian culture. Making this happen would of course mean a huge redistribution of wealth as we redistribute the population, and thereby the profits, more evenly across the available geography. We simply cannot have that, even if it means the doom of the species in a few short decades.
No, no, no... we must keep the current system wherein human beings put themselves into debt for a lifetime for the privilege of shipping themselves great distances 6 times a week, at their own cost, to and from the centralized abattoirs and sanatoriums which we call the modern workplace. And lets not forget to keep rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic; that is so much more important than fixing the hole which is sucking us all in.
mnem
/SOAPBOX
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