Substitutions for gasoline:
...
Hope you get the picture. If you don't, substitution doesn't mean equivalent/similar thing. Email is substitution for paper letters through post office. The two are entirely unrelated technologies.
All of which require either a massive change in lifestyle (which a lot of people would find annoying, especially if suddenly the bus service was overloaded by millions of other people doing the same thing) or such a massive investment either from you or infrastructure wise that it would unsustainable (Eg, every petrol station would need to provide ethanol, and the charging technology for electric cars which isn't a tremendous hassle (refueling a car is about equivilent to a 10MW power line running into it) hasn't even been invented yet). Substitution doesn't have to mean an equivalent or similar thing but it does however have to the same outcome as before you started.
You do realize that driving is actually a substitution for taking a train, right? No one imagined that an infrastructure like railroad tracks can be replaced. Yet it was, even despite the massive changes in lifestyle. Personally I still prefer trains, and hope someday they will replace cars again. Or at least that cars will not be necessary, because work could be done from anywhere online, and so few people need to travel that trains will be more than enough.
The maximum possible thermal ...blah-engines-blah... that the ones we have now, really.
Incidently by saying no one puts money and research into generators...blah-engine-based-generators-blah... because then lights in the operating theatre went out)
Again, you are only focusing on internal combustion engines, and the need for an engine, period. Sure, many businesses have generators, but only for emergencies. Barely any depend on them for their main source of power, and barely any personal houses have generators. Once generators become something people actually buy for their home as a main source of power, we will likely look at today's tech same way we look at typewriters now. Japan is working on a personal nuclear plant the size of a trailer that can be buried in the back yard. My university is working on a gassificator that turns garbage into combustible gas to generate power. Solar powered stirling engines are getting more research and may be becoming more efficient than photovoltaic cells. Houses are using more tech that lets them stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer without generating power. And that's just for electricity.
I am not arguing that there isn't a semi-monopoly on gasoline and internal combustion engines, I am arguing that this monopoly is as relevant as a monopoly on land lines, type writers, and horse buggy whips.
Email is used because there is no barrier to entry apart from owning a computer, which most people will own for (at least) work purposes, Pen and paper isn't used because computer servers offer faster response times for finding, checking and writing reports (this one should be obvious I don't even know why you tried to use this as a rebuttal honestly),
But according to your argument, the high barrier to entry for running a monopoly like the post office would not have allowed email to even exist!
and frankly if I even have to describe the advantages of a motorised vehicle over a horse to you I'm going to assume you're brain damaged.
But that's exactly what you have been doing: defending the modern equivalent of a horse by saying there are no substitutes for "horses," and the barrier to entry for "horses" is too high, ignoring the fact that within a few years, the modern equivalent of a horse monopoly is irrelevant.
