The irony, or market working I guess, is that as demand for gas and fossil fuel goes down so does the price. This keeps the incentive to keep burning gas. During this recent price drop larger vehicle sales with worse gas mileage increased. I live in a city myself and its hard to realize this when all you see are smaller cars around, but in suburban, rural, Texas, larger gas vehicle are still the rule vs the exception it seems.
> Horses were obsolete within 15 years of private automobiles being a thing - by 1920 more freight was hauled and more passenger-miles were travelled by internal combustion than horse, in the US.
I'm not quite sure the analogy fits exactly. This is because the production (breeding?) of horses wasn't the most profitable industry man has every created. Remember still some of the most profitable companies in the world are fossil fuel companies. Exxon is still #2 and Chevron is #5. Also, unlike a company like Apple, they have been this way for decades. Brutal dictators are propped from oil. Entire countries rely on oil for their very existence. Due the the shear amount of money involved I do not see fossil fuels going quietly into the night based on market forces alone. As long as they are cheaper and more convenient for humanity we will use them. What we really need, in my opinion, is to #1 end the ridiculous subsidies that fossil fuel companies get and #2 enact a carbon tax where we give the proceeds of this tax to fund renewable energy research and to help out the millions of workers who will loss their jobs from the transition off of fossil fuels.
Here's another way of looking at it. In the 90s we had the big tobacco thing. 7 of these executives lied under oath that tobacco wasn't addictive. After countless hearings, lawsuits with rewards of the billions of $$$, high use taxes around the world, some of these companies are still around. People still use their products. They are expanding into emerging countries, vaping and maybe even weed. They are using trade protections to expand into those emerging markets.
Now take an industry, make it more profitable and give it millions of federal tax breaks and subsidies. Oh and instead of an economy of say Virginia or North Carolina based off of it have economies like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Nigeria owe their development from it.
I'm not saying we can't migrate off of fossil fuels. It needs to happen, and happen very quickly. However, its important to understand the shear size of the problem at hand.