alt Hacker News> If there were few of us, building replacements for our engines would be more economical than bombing our neighbors to influence gas prices.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of human motivation. We could do the more economical thing right now but we don't. We could have done it decades ago when there were much fewer people on the planet but we didn't. No change in the population level will alter this.
I don't know what you mean. Of course we could have, but we didn't. We didn't because building 10,000 electric cars vs 10,000 bombs is a no brainer, but building 500,000,000 cars vs the same 10,000 bombs is a different kind of problem. Intimidation and transportation scale differently. At different scales, different decisions are more likely.