California's dry season is turning into a permanent state of being

Despite the existence of a tiny fraction of electrical vehicles, we are nowhere near on track to decarbonizing in time. In order to naturally shift over to EVs in time, with the natural aging out of gas vehicles, we would have had to be at 100% EV for new vehicles in 2020. We won't be to 100% new EVs any time soon at all.

In contrast, other sectors are really easy to decarbonize. Electricity generation will decarbonize faster than current predictions, because everybody uses old data in their models, and even two year old renewable data is hopelessly out of date.

Heating by heat pumps rather than natural gas is also fairly easy to transition through building codes. Simply requiring all new outdoor AC units to include the $200 switch to also heat would result in a fairly speedy transition for the second largest residential use.

So with the conundrum of transport, the only real solution we have is for people to drive less, while also transitioning to EVs as soon as possible. However we have planned nearly all of the US for car-dependency, and there are very few places to live in the US that don't require a car. Very few. This land use change, to allow car-free living, is a bigger battle than switching away from meat, and far harder to convince people to do. There are so many more vegetarians and vegans than people that acknowledge we should allow less driving, and it's a switch that takes far longer to make.

Further, this switch to less driving is under local control, controlled by local planning committees and local transit committees, not mysterious billionaires living in mansions. It's under supposedly-democratic control, it's just that the people showing up to these meetings are not people who care about climate change, or at least they don't realize the connection between land use and climate change.

I don't have links, as I found out about by asking what happened in the San Yanez and Santa Maria valleys to someone who works in Ag finance (they are starkly barren compared to what they were just a few years ago and I was very curious), but California berry production has been almost completely off-shored to Argentina. As they explained, berries are a low margin crop to begin with that absolutely requires hand picking, and California's minimum wage laws along with cheaper refrigerate freight have driven the local farmers out of business. He seemed to think that California Ag was completely on its way out, and that we can expect to be importing almost all of our fresh vegetables and fruits from South America.

Another alternative is to promote private-vehicle alternatives: transit, bikes, walkable neighbourhoods, etc. That might occur more quickly, at least within some regions.

Residential retrofits are similarly slow. New-construction mandates effect only a thin margin of housing, and in regions where new housing construct vastly lags demand (coff-California-coff), that would be centuries. There's now talk of retrofits, though easy replacements (stoves/cooking) neglect hard ones (water and space heat, clothes dryers). Again, replacment cycles for those are on the order of 10--20 years, and require considerable grid upgrades.

Your point about the US (and much the rest of the world) being designed for car-dependence is precisely what I'm talking about by "collective action". The private automobile singlehandedly created the dominant land-use patterns of the 20th century, and reversing reliance on the automobile will require utterly transforming land use, again. And that is a collective problem, not an individual one. The most gold/platinum/green LEED ratings for a building do nothing if it induces 40,000 miles of daily private vehicle commute demand. Convert that to walkable, bikable, and LRV transit, and you're avoiding 800 gallons of fuel consumption a day, 160,000 gallons/year.

And that doesn't happen simply through individual mandates.

The influence of "billionaires living in mansions" on housing is stronger than you give credence, as real estate forms a principle asset class for the financial sector, and hence, asset inflation serves multiple interests. This isn't the only factor behind promoting auto-dependent sprawl, but it's an extraordinarily powerful one.