The obvious answers are things like plastics, but we can already kind of tell those are bad.
I dunno, actually, it is hard to say because we tend to be a little pessimistic nowadays, I don’t think we overlook much, it is just that there’s an all encompassing feeling that every choice has negative outcomes and we have to pick one. Maybe that’s the thing we’re overlooking, cynicism disguised as skepticism resulting in total paralysis.
But it wasn't a bad decision. Unless we believe that investing ICE or steam engines was a bad decision. Based on technology available at the time electric batter powered cars were a dead end. The market was just too small to justify the massive investment required to make them competitive with ICEs.
I hope I’m wrong, but fear it will be that democracies protect themselves poorly from populists/demagogues. Watching a documentary on the fall of the Roman republic, it was hard to think it couldn’t happen here. Or as wrongly attributed to Edmund Burke, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”.
