Municipalities often have bonkers cost structures and imposed limits on tax increases (limits in state laws and such). Here they are redoing lead service lines, rebuilding substandard water mains and repaving streets. State and Federal grants are paying for a lot of it, along with increases to water rates (to maybe 5-10% above the national average, enough to make people unhappy, but not out of control).

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...

Do we think that there is going to be a major break from that?

You are also begging the question, asserting that the law has no useful impact and is thus useless or even harmful.

That leads lots of companies to go the low cost route and use the notification safe harbor, but it also creates an incentive to find alternatives and so on. You get cases like you mention, but the alternative to the evidence based approach is to hand wave that it's not harmful.

The same is at least less true for private citizens that are not being accused of a crime.

Tesla was always an option on batteries improving at roughly the widely forecasted rates. This is the same information that the established automakers used to not focus on electric vehicles.

Is your argument that attrition without replacement just doesn't count or something?

I guess that or go full on Judge Dredd.

Still, we've come a long way from impossible if we are merely looking at a hard problem.

The way I look at it, everyone being better off as far as energy in 2035 is a political and logistical problem, not a fundamental problem.