> In the long run, society goes to 100% electric transportation due to global warming. Any analysis that treats this as a simple matter of consumer choice is going to miss the biggest driver of adoption.

As @Ray20 pointed out, this is Western thinking. The only factor that will flip most poorer people is a direct economic incentive. Who cares about the weather when your children cannot eat.

> Maybe some alternate carbon-neutral fuel for combustion is possible, but all the ones we’ve tried so far have lost out to electric.

It was getting more efficient, but this stopped ever since all the governments got together and decided that by 2035 no more combustion vehicles would be sold. All incentives to produce more efficient combustion vehicles went out the window.

We are actually only a handful of inventions away from pretty low emissions combustion engines. There have already been significant inventions, such as the catalytic converter, DPF, fuel additives, turbos, intercoolers, direct water injection, etc.

I suspect we were only years from seeing KERS and MGU-H during acceleration events. I think it is also quite likely there would have been more effort to push for hybrid vehicles where only small batteries are used, again for acceleration events. Improvements in manufacturing processes would allow for high tolerances, increasing internal pressures and combustion efficiency.

Definitely going to be hard to understand incentives if you think it's just "the weather."

Not just global warming but eventually oil depletion. Fracking has given the oil industry a stay of execution but it will work until it doesn’t and the cheapest stuff is exhausted, just like conventional drilling.

We know how to build good EVs now, which means the result of this will be a lot less catastrophic than twenty or thirty years ago. We are lucky the peak oilers back then underestimated.

Yes, I don't think many people realize this but we have like ~46 years of oil left in total. That's not very much. It will just keep getting more expensive. Even if we keep burning coal for electricity, we still have 140 years of that left, so it's just a matter of relatively short time until the optimum flips in favor of electric.

I wouldn't be surprised if we stretch it further than 46 years. All previous estimates have been under-estimates. Still, it's a bit like stock market bubbles. During a bubble bears are wrong many times and right once.

Your estimate for coal is probably low, unfortunately. There are vast amounts of it in places like Alaska and Siberia and elsewhere in the Arctic, maybe Antarctica too if that melts enough. We probably have enough carbon to destroy the world if we really don't give a damn and decide we don't want Florida. We have quite a lot of gas, too, which is not nearly as bad as coal for climate change but isn't great if we keep using it forever and at huge scale.

The bottom line is that transition to electrified everything powered by solar, wind, hydro, nuclear (maybe fusion too eventually), and geothermal, is inevitable. The question is the timetable. Oil will be the first fossil fuel to go. It's already many times more expensive per kWh as a source of energy due to the difficult of substituting it for internal combustion engines and aviation.

>I don't think many people realize this but we have like ~46 years of oil left in total.

My parents remember reading those in 70's

I can't tell whether you're trying to make an argument with this comment or what's the reason for pointing that out.

The point is peak oil as a concept has existed for a long time, and we have extended way past its deadline before. It relies on not having technological advancement for accessing more oil.

Not exactly: it relies on future sources of oil (unconventional oil) having lower EROI (Energy return on investment) than historical oil reserves (conventional oil). Technological advancements could conceivably increase the EROI of some unconventional sources, but they mainly seem to make new lower EROI sources available.

Sure but that's not really argument for anything, it's just hopium. Oil is a finite resource, it will run out. Just because some breakthrough shift the timelines doesn't mean that the analysis isn't sound. There's no guarantee that another breakthrough is always coming.

>In the long run, society goes to 100% electric transportation due to global warming.

This is Western-centrism. In the long run 4 billion people do not go electric because poverty problem solving more important for them, then the global warming problem solving, and another 4 billion people do not consider global warming as a problem at all, the wormer - the better. And under this conditions what the remaining 2 billion people will do is not important at all.

In the long run, we go to 100% renewable electric everything, or civilization collapses and almost everyone dies. Of course, the latter case is probably the more likely one.

Pretty much every sentence in this comment doesn't correspond to reality. You should first go look at some real world data before commenting on this issue.