Diesel engines play a huge role in our current life (food, goods, trash, you name it) and the current electric offerings are essentially a joke compared to what a diesel engine can do… but here’s hoping that by 2036 things are different.
Though it would probably would not help for delivering goods to smaller cities which cannot justify their own railroad.
https://corporate.findlaw.com/contracts/land/549-south-dawso...
There is also a nationwide growing popularity of 'inland ports' where goods are brought by rail from the coastal ports to a specific transfer point operated by the port authority relatively nearby. This avoids fewer over the road truck miles but an advantage is that the port authority can use dedicated rail shuttle service with high frequency which means very high throughput. The east coast has a few that help goods dodge the highly trafficked I-95 corridor and reduce coastal port congestion.
If it weren't for natural gas we would still have massive coal fired power plants.
If you look at UK emissions which have been declining steadily since the 1990s, this has been in no small part due to the move to natural gas.
While it would be great to move to carbon neutral immediately, we can't do that without driving up energy prices massively and causing widespread poverty and disruption, so there is definitely room for some middle ground compromises.