I think many of these places in Europe will, in fact, adopt the deadlines and ban ICE vehicles, as they have shown to be resistant to public pressure. There are two issues, one is state capacity both to administer complex infrastructure change like this, as well as to suppress the popular pressures against it. The second is the practicality of the change -- switching to EV cars in Singapore is very different from doing the same on the steppes of Uzbekistan, the mountains of Turkey, or the rural parts of China. Only a fool would try to mandate something across the board -- which brings us back to the EU.

Life is going to get very hard in Europe for the average middle class family. I'm betting on significant standard of living declines in Europe across the board. People will complain, maybe even riot, but that's not going to make a difference to EU bureaucrats or to the British ruling class. If you have middle or lower class friends/relatives there and communicate regularly with them, you can pick up on the general gloomy view of the future in Western Europe.

Fortunately, most of Asia and the US, where the majority of the world's economy and population are located, is unlikely to implement universal mandates (excepting places like Singapore and Japan) -- they will be one option among other options. California, I expect, will relent simply because the state as a whole lacks the administrative competence to upgrade its grid to support mass EV usage. It lacks the competence to provide reliable power even now.

China is rolling out EVs in massive numbers, together with the necessary infrastructure in big cities, simply because there's not enough oil in the world to support 800 million cars driving around China, and it would be an air pollution nightmare -- something that Beijing is very sensitive about. But at the same time, China is not banning gas cars; rural areas still rely on gas cars, buses, and trucks. I remember being in a rickety old bus traveling a pot-hole filled road from Kunming to Li Jiang that lasted about 15 hours - there is simply no way you can do this with an EV. But China is again following a rational plan in which regional needs are taken into account, as China has experience deploying infrastructure at scale and is responsive to public pressures in a way that most western bureaucracies are not. Being a party dictatorship forces you to listen to the public on issues that matter because you cannot fall back on the legitimacy provided by elections -- which is why China just rolled back the zero covid policy. Holding elections often grants the government powers to do all sorts of anti-democratic things, even if the real policies are decided by structures designed to be unaccountable to voters. This is the essence of the administrative state.

It is this unique government structure, together with administrative competence, that's going to allow the EU to enforce these measures even as the rest of the world cannot. But at some point, EU voters are going to get wise to the fact that they are being ruled by structures over which they have no effective levers of control, and then things will get interesting. The EU announced they will create a small army -- they call it a "stabilization force" that can suppress attempted revolutions or unrest, so for a general riot like the Yellow Vests or Dutch Farmer, the local government is expected to suppress it, but if there is successful anti-EU revolution, then this army will be sent in. I expect this stabilization force to be busy in the next few decades.