Emission-free car fuel made from air and water

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

Thats the main TECHNICAL problem, yes.
The real problem is that there are too many cars and that the oil is toxic and that the exhaust fumes are toxic and that an oil economy needs pipelines and gas stations and the lot.

Well, yeah, but the toxicity here is "conserved" - if the oil is in your vehicle, it can't be polluting anything.

It is crazy to keep up this consumption. And every such technological "improvement" seems to do mainly one thing: Consume more energy

Consuming energy, in and of itself, is not a problem. After all, if we actually got fusion working, and used shiny and efficient nuclear for everything, we could consume PWhs or even EWhs of energy with comparatively negligible impact on the environment.

The problem is that our energy-generation processes produce harmful by-products and use resources in ways that aren't sustainable for the time-scale we'd like. Sufficiently advanced engineering can change this - we merely have to develop and use it.

Fixing the latter is easier than changing the former for two reasons:
1) To change how people consume energy, you must convince them of a benefit that's very hard to visualize. In order to generate power efficiently, you must invent a device and convince a business to use it. The latter is massively easier than the former - people in general are irrational and bad at forward thinking, whereas business managers are generally frustratingly rational and far better at forward thinking, especially where investments are concerned.
2) Attempting to significantly lower the energy used by people directly impacts their quality of life - and therefore attempting to do it directly contradicts most humans' nature. Good luck.