The nation is ready to move away from gasoline and diesel, the magnates are the ones who don't want to move that way. (mostly because they are old, and set in their ways, and in denial about the reality of climate change.)
Okay, and replace them with what?
Even with current technology, renewable sources plus hydraulic storage is cost-competitve with coal. Nuclear is expensive to start up, but runs clean except for the spent fuel (which is probably less toxic than coal pollution due to scale), and natural gas burns very cleanly as long as we have a supply of it. Meeting 100% of electricity needs without a lump of coal or a drop of petroleum is feasible, if we could push through a Manhattan Project level of funding to subsidize it ( even without subsidies, we'll get there sooner or later, but it will take much longer) and get it quickly.
For personal transportation, transitioning to electric vehicles is already inevitable, and another Manhattan Project investment in mass transit would be even more efficient.
Ah, but we weren't talking about powering our electrical grids, were we? For one thing, gasoline and diesel don't play a significant role in electrical power generation outside of standby generators and emergency backup power, and as you rightly point out, improvements in energy storage continue to make renewables more dispatchable anyway. I'd highlighted those specifically because
the 67% of our petroleum consumption that goes into motor gasoline and distillate fuel oils is overwhelmingly used for transportation, and that's where technical feasibility becomes at best a distant memory in the face of political and social concerns.
Even if we look only at personal transportation -- which, admittedly, accounts for a lot of our gas consumption -- transitioning to electric vehicles is beyond economically impossible for a majority of Americans; recall that
40% of them can't handle a $400 unexpected expenditure. Setting that aside, actually keeping those cars running is going to involve installing a lot of charging stations, and our national infrastructure is beyond decrepit.
But okay, let's say we get $23 billion behind it, a literal (inflation-adjusted) Manhattan Project investment, and try to subsidize those problems away. Here is what is going to happen: first, every Republican in America is going to riot against the ivory tower coastal elites coming with their abortion-powered death squads to take away their monster trucks today and their guns and Medicaid and freedoms tomorrow. Expect to see much of the South dotted in gasoline fires in protest, and heavily armed people in cowboy hats roasting marshmallows over them. They will be joined, or at least bitterly agreed with, by the legions of social justice warriors who have determined that these subsidies are disproportionately benefiting white people, or men, or cis people, or funding colonization efforts to steal rare earth metals, or some other thing that makes it immoral to spend government money on this instead of just giving it to them directly. Farmers will whine about how they could instead be paid more to not grow alfalfa. Minority groups will come out of the woodwork to demand that the money be injected into their
hands communities instead because they need health care or clean water or reparations or any of a hundred other things more than they need electric cars, because that's how people evaluate alternatives where government spending is concerned. Puff pieces about how the Amish received subsidies to replace their horse-drawn wagons will compete for attention with "powerful, hard-hitting" statements from automaker shills about how electric cars are killing Detroit. Everyone involved will have their past dissected for anything to justify hit pieces by the social justice crowd about how the Electric Car Manhattan Project needs to be run by someone demographically similar to them. All the while, the oil and car lobbies will be vomiting money at anyone willing to lick an electric car's battery terminals and then go sue, and this is America so
there will be millions of them, and of course every Republican-owned legislature in the country will fight tooth and nail to make electric cars and charging stations illegal because they cause windmill cancer.
See, we can't do public-facing top-down projects on that scale anymore, because everyone in this country is convinced they're an expert on how public money should be spent, so you're just painting a gigantic target sign on the whole endeavor for everyone to rush to capitalize on everyone else's indignation in the hopes that when it finally dies, they get a piece of the financial corpse; all the legitimate problems with it to which solutions might be found are drowned out by the legions complaining that the wrong people are winning, which sets up another stupid tribalism slap fight that has no good outcome. We're a nation of awareness raisers, of professional complainers, of people who have convinced themselves that the Internet can transmute whining into activism. Three hundred million people stand ready to stand in front of progress and try to name their price to let it happen because they can't feel like they exist without sticking their finger into every pie going, and approximately zero of them will still care by the time their actual concerns are addressed because they've moved on to some new outrage.
As I see it, then, we have two options. The first is to go quietly and hope that the adoption of renewably powered transportation is indeed inevitable, bracing ourselves for it to take decades for all the people parking across charging stations to finally die.
The second is Green New Deal-induced civil war.
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