Perhaps we could have had electric vehicles sooner, but we would have needed clean sources of electricity, not coal powered generation, to make a difference.
Many of the largest early sources of electricity were, in fact, hydro power. We could've just kept building more of those until the mid 20th century when we would've pretty much maxed out the rivers (in the US).
And don't forget wind power. Could do that, too. The intermittentness handled in areas by hydro as well. Then nuclear in the mid 20th century.
If we talk about world, not just USA, then many places just don't have the luxury of hydro, or even wind. And often gas needs to be imported making it expensive. Coal was just cheap and effective to begin with.
No, it would not have been needed because even with coal-generated electricity, EV are cleaner than ICE (because small engine are far less efficient than big power plants).
Besides, if all the car were powered by electricity, we probably would have made the electric grid cleaner and switch to renewables far sooner. Because switching from coal to gas and gas to solar/wind would have had a positive impact on almost all types of energy consumption: train, cars, heating, lightning, etc. Instead we had to invest in both the electric grid and ICE to try to make them clean, instead of just the grid.
According to the information found on page 7 of Cleaner Cars from Cradle to Grave, a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists [1], an electric vehicle that is charged by electricity from oil or coal generation has overall equivalent emissions to a gasoline vehicle that obtains 29 miles/gallon. Roughly on par with fuel-efficient contemporary gasoline powered vehicles. So I stand by my claim that electric cars don't solve the problem without addressing the emissions due to coal/oil based grid power.
In an alternative history, perhaps we could avoid petrochemical power, but it's not clear to me how we would have done that. Ford began production of the Model T in 1908. Solar and wind production would not have been feasible in the early 20th century, and even today hydroelectric power provides only a fraction of our energy consumption. See [2].
With regard to the original article, I find its analysis flawed. As I've already stated, power production for electric vehicles wouldn't have been clean in the early 1900's, but modern clean electric cars depend on more than a power grid based on renewable energy sources. They depend on lithium-ion batteries, invented in 1980. What would the country's electric cars have utilized before the 1980s? (Lead-acid and NiCad have serious environmental impacts, Lead-acid has poor energy vs weight, and NiMH batteries were not invented until 1989. All three of these battery types have charging rate limits that prevent them from being used in practical cars.[3])
Perhaps we could have done much better in the past with our decisions, but "masculine daring-do"[4] isn't the reason that we ended up with the levels of CO2 that we have in the atmosphere today.
