I'm not opposed to the idea of cleaner energy and cleaner air -- we absolutely need it. But assuming we change nothing about our economic system and we just try to keep our current economic/political systems as they are but instead of being powered by fossil fuels they're powered by renewables, there are several consequences.
One is that this will simply kick off intense competition for those resources. Species compete for available energy in order to reproduce and propagate their own kind. This is true on an inter-species level and this is true on an intra-species level, too. Humans compete with other humans, just as they compete with other species. People will point out that the US has produced more cumulative emissions than China and India and others since 1950 and still do so even today on a per capita basis, which is correct. But that's not because the US is evil or loves destroying the environment for shits and giggles; that's because we have been more successful over the last 75 years at competing for energy and other resources. When we become less successful, we will consume less and others will consume more - at least if nothing systemically changes. Total global consumption won't change until there is a moment of rapidly depleting and degraded resources (i.e., environmental collapse). But there will be intense global competition for resources right up until that moment, right up to the very end - unless something changes systemically.
The point I'm trying to make is that the race to electrify everything is going to mean another kind of highly intense competition for a new source of energy. It will kick off a race to mine metals on a massive, massive scale, so I really doubt that we're going to really clean much of anything, environmentally speaking. We're going to compete with China, India, Brazil...maybe Russia and certainly others in a race to rip up the earth's surface and ocean ecosystems to mine for metals. And oh by the way, that will require a shit ton of fossil fuels in the extraction process.
Another consequence is that in the short term, cleaner air may actually...make the earth's surface even hotter and quite rapidly. Definitely better in the long-term to reduce emissions, but reducing aerosols from emissions reflects less radiation. So more radiation hits the earth's surface. The consequential heat rise could be quite sudden, and in fact there's speculation and some scientific indication already that this is partly what's driving the extreme North Atlantic ocean warming now. Ships began reducing sulfur emissions around 2018-2020. The point is not that we shouldn't reduce emissions -- we should. But we need to know the consequences and be prepared to mitigate somehow.
