Hi Micro! I completely agree, especially with the idea that FORCE doesn't work very well. If we learned anything from 100 years of experimenting on rats it is that punishment doesn't extinguish behavior. Punishment only temporarily suppresses and tends to push behavior underground.
If there were no option to force, and the social need were desperate enough (say a virus with a 30% lethality for young people), maybe some temporary restraint could be justified. But this isn't that. We've had 50 years, since 1970s oil crisis, to come up with incentives. But NOTHING has been done. Nothing like 50% off property tax for houses with southern trombe walls and 50% lower heating/cooling costs. Nothing.
So I hear you. BTW, I am not holding myself out as an examplar of "green", although I do now have a well, tons of solar panels, lots of food trees, a green house, no lawn to water, etc. But peak oil issue concerns me mostly because the more critically I look and think about it, the more intractible and obvious the problem becomes. **IF** peak oil isn't already here by simple physics, it WILL be here soon enough. Oil wells don't replenish in less than a billion years or so, and we DON'T have any substitute for hydrocarbons for most things in most locations.
WRT your idea for a car solely electric powered with a fuel generator on-board to keep the batteries topped off, I thought that's what the Chevy Volt was (https://hybridautopart.com/blog-en/chevy-volt/)??
Regardless, wouldn't you know they DISCONTINUED the Volt after 2019 model year, curiously *just* in time for the Great Reset to begin. I don't believe in coincidences. But I don't have a sufficient explanation for why such a common-sense approach wasn't acceptable to Our Masters. The Volt *was* a dramatic step in the direction Our Masters wanted to nudge us and it had proven and desirable technology. You could drive locally on 100% battery power and I believe it had a plug if you had solar panels.
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