Yup, the idea of electric cars is great, but it easily becomes something like Braess Paradox. Where building bigger roads leads to more cars & more traffic. Building electric cars just means fuel is cheaper so people drive more.
And even if we were able to electrify every single vehicle in the world, with sufficient charging infrastructure, cheap reliable renewable energy, and abundant resources for cheap replacement batteries; that still leads to collapse. Assuming electric cars are afforable,b that pushes more “investing” in so many car-centric single-family suburbs that are cashflow negative will have to finally face drastic increases in taxes. We’ll wish that walkability and public transit should had been prioritized, as we desperately densify in patchwork ways that cost more in the long run.
Then if you look at the amount of pollution caused by rubber tires, continuing with electric cars using rubber tires is just leading to collapse from inhaled particles and forever chemicals.
The answer has always been walkable cities with infrastructure for bikes, busses, streetcars, and rail. This temporary century-long obsession with abandoning what’s worked for human cities and splurging with the assumption that the temporary abundance of cheap energy would never end. But we never change in time.
The problem is it’s extremely energy intensive. The math just doesn’t work. IIRC, we currently have three big “carbon capture” plants operating to try and remove CO2 from the atmosphere. (As opposed to the carbon capture they do in things like concrete plants.) Those plants are operating at a fraction the efficiency they expected. Age even if they did work, we’d need to open a new plant like those every single day for a decade before we could capture just the emissions we’re putting out right now.
It’s not gonna work.