I read the story about NW Indiana, South Chicago, and Lake Michigan.

The Great Lakes were long a dumping ground for whatever, and for decades now there have been efforts to quit the dumping and clean up the place.

A lot of progress has been made: E.g., some people I know who live on Lake Erie and do a lot of boating say that the lake used to be just filthy, put scum on boats, etc., but now is much cleaner.

Yes, apparently for some reason it was common to dump PCBs in rivers. Then the mud at the bottoms of the rivers got the PCBs; even when the dumping stopped, the PCBs kept leaching out and causing trouble, say, for wildlife and using the river for drinking water. This was the story in the Hudson River. IIRC, the clean up effort has been extensive and somewhat successful but very expensive and long lasting.

The story about NW Indiana and South Chicago has residential homes in the shadows of oil refineries, electric generating plants, steel mills, etc. Those homes should have been bought out long ago.

Apparently now we know how to make such industrial plants clean enough, and maybe we are.

On the externalities, it appears that mostly the pollution is left over from the past, decades ago, clean up efforts have been going on for decades, and maybe now new industries have to be clean enough. In this case, the pollution externalities are from the past, not the present.

For CO2 and global warming, I responded to that in another post on this OP -- net, I'm not concerned.

For the "subsidies", so far I have yet to see a clear, credible description of those.

But apparently it is common for a plant, essentially anything that can generate employment, to get various subsidies, tax breaks, help with worker training, etc. E.g., it was just announced that Toshiba and SolarCity will be taking over some old factories in Buffalo, NY and building solar panels or whatever. Well, NYS and Cuomo gave them some financial help.

Apparently such financial help is common -- the local communities and the states want the jobs and associated tax revenue from the employees, the increased economic activity, etc. and regard the financial help as worthwhile. I suspect that if the businesses are successful, NYS will get the money back plus a lot more.

IIRC, the regulations now on coal fired electric generating plants are so severe that really can't start a new plant and, for an old one, about have to shut it down. As I explained above in this thread, I'm not at all concerned about the CO2 from burning coal, but other stuff that might come out the smoke stack should be of concern -- radioactivity (right, from coal, really much more than is coming from nuke plants), heavy metals (mercury?), sulfur (causing acid rain?), maybe some concerns over some oxides of nitrogen, black smoke from carbon soot, etc.? But my understanding is that long ago there were good cleanup techniques and efforts for such stuff from burning coal -- stack gas scrubbers or some such.

It looks like now Obama, his EPA, etc. are using CO2 as an excuse to go after coal in an effort just to shut down coal; to me, that is foolish. We need to use coal, if only for making steel. If we can generate cheap electric power from coal safely without harmful pollution, then to me we should. Apparently Buffett believes that the US will continue to burn coal to generate electric power because recently he bought Burlington Northern Railroad which carries a lot of coal to electric power plants.

But, I'd like to see lots more electric power from nuclear fission -- uranium, plutonium, thorium, whatever -- and nuclear fusion when and if we can make that work.

I'm sorry about what happened over the past 100+ years to many of the major US rivers -- Mississippi, Ohio, Hudson, Calumet, Cuyahoga (right, the one that had a spill that actually caught fire) -- along with Chesapeake Bay, Gulf of Mexico, maybe San Francisco bay, maybe Long Island Sound, etc.

Easily, our most dense central cities won't like lots of private cars. Okay.

Easily our rural and suburban areas and smaller cities will like lots of private cars and will buy more of them as soon as they have the money -- one car for Dad to commute to the office; one car for Mom to move the kids, laundry, groceries, take the family to the beach, etc.; one car for Junior as he turns 18 or so; another car for Sis, etc. If Junior has a 10 year old used car, okay, but he'd have a new Corvette if he could afford it. Outside of the dense cities, people need/like cars.

Yes, we need to clean up the messes of the past, and I suspect that in total a lot of money is being spent to do that and significant progress is being made.

But I also suspect that now we can burn gasoline in cars, burn coal and natural gas, etc. safely and cleanly enough.

With the cleanup done from pollution from 50+ years ago, we will be able to can catch and eat fish and shell fish in the Great Lakes, the major rivers, the major bays, offshore in the salt water, etc. and, IMHO, we should.

Net, I'm not seeing why private cars that burn gasoline and provide personal and family transportation outside the dense central cities are a bad idea. And, for the OP, I can't believe that there will be fewer cars; instead, outside of the dense central cities, people will buy more cars as soon as they have the money.

For self-driving cars, I see no hope for a long time.