But passenger vehicles account for such a small overall percentage of global GHG emissions, I don’t know why so much of the focus was on EVs to begin with.

When I last looked it up, it was around 6% of emissions.

I have looked into your question intensively and I have a possible answer.

My feeling is that humanity has focussed on corporate, product-based “green economy” / economic growth solutions where we had emerging technology waiting in the wings.

Basically, these are painless transitions that don’t require any Herculean lifting and we don’t have to reinvent our societies.

If you look at the LARGE sectors like: industry, heating, agriculture and building all dwarf the emissions of cars. Most of the technological development in feeding and housing people and making goods is nowhere near some widespread paradigm shift.

We simply don’t have technical ability to get rid of the other emissions while maintaining our population and status quo. We have no inventions.

In the absence of real progress, there has been this kaleidoscope of misinformation campaigns to obscure what is going on:

• Sometimes people extol the possibility of some tech idea but don’t explain how much time and resources it takes to scale it.
• Sometimes the accounting is fraud, like off shoring manufacturing, importing power across jurisdictions, counting biomass as green, not counting methane in agriculture, etc
• Often there is focus on real issues that don’t even work within the solution space of reducing emissions
• One of the biggest scams lately is to switch from talking about absolute emissions growth to speaking of everything in relative or percwntage terms. Eg. "New power generation went from 1% solar to 10% solar in just X years, but meanwhile in absolute terms fossil fuel use is actually growing at unprecedented rates in the background. ( Meaning that we are not actually making any kind of transition at all, the information is presented out of context to distort the picture and drive a narrative.)

Etc etc.

So in short, I think the answer is that we focus on EVs because we are in extremely big trouble. Everything external to that is devastingly bad and getting worse.

This is a case of putting people to sleep and / or telling them what they want to hear.

It’s actually a major obstacle in dealing with our problems. We have to become clear on what the stakes are before we can start to figure out a solution.

. . .

One thing that comes along in the grieving process is that there are different solutions.

Many collapse aware people prefer we try to mitigate the damage from climate change, consumerism, etc.

However, just crashing the Holocene biosphere actually solves all the problems. The human population will go way down or disappear and basically all the bad stuff will go away. Like, its entirely possible that this will be miserable / achingly bad but the “let 'er rip” approach to maximal human costs by doing nothing is actually probably the likely path. The hard pill to swallow is that most of our fellow humans are voting for this in terms of actions speaking louder than words.

Humans, I believe, are essentially a kind of unacknowledged “pyrophyte” fire-needinf species where our ability to use fire (or, external abiotic energy, in general) is part of our essential biology. I don’t know that humans have any survival path without doing what we are doing on some level. You just have a lot of humans following their nature now.

Renewables also have their dark side that none of the proponents want to talk about, or if they do they use whataboutism to point out that at least it’s not as bad as X and Y. Even the name renewable is a falsehood to tap into the idea of some perpetual cycle that doesn’t harm anything.

Although I agree with your point, the real loss of focus goes even further than energy production. It’s energy demand. What was the first R in the three Rs of the 70s that was quickly tossed for just Recycling? Reduce. We have done a poor, poor job of any type of reduction, in fact we’re done the opposite thanks to consumerism and population growth, both warned about long ago. And now the rest of the world wants to join in on the higher standard of living (which is understandable), and that can only push the line faster up.

It’s a shame that I can’t downvote you across this federated connection.