Here’s former Texas A&M geologist, Earl Cook,  and his full quote from a 1971 article in Scientific American.

The automobile engine and its present fuel simply cannot be cleaned up sufficiently to make it an acceptable urban citizen. It seems clear that the internal-combustion engine will be banned from the central city by the year 2000; it should probably be banned right now. Because our cities are shaped for automobiles, not for mass transit, we shall have to develop battery-powered or flywheel-powered cars and taxis for inner-city transport.

Well, we’re not quite there yet, but how about the kindler, gentler, 21st-century version: congestion taxes?

(This is part of my on-going forecasts project, which details just how bad we are at predicting what the world is going to look like.)

Photo: Tom Baker.