Interesting chronology of the tobacco industry there, but I don't think you can equate fossil fuels to tobacco. I'm playing a bit of devil's advocate here, and oversimplifying... Tobacco is a certain type of vice. Vice has always been, and always will be in demand. Certainly, tobacco usage was curbed via science and a change in public opinion, but big tobacco still limps by to this day. So this is less about public opinion, because most people don't actually care about how their energy consumption needs are met. This is more about economic forcing. If it's cheaper to not use fossil fuel, game over. Fossil fuel's political allies will turn away the moment that their pockets get lighter, which is of course driven by profit (or the lack thereof). The fossil fuel industry will not continue to limp on, it will rather abruptly die.
Sure, of course. The question is what will it take to make alternatives to fossil fuels cheaper? Take the automobile - to fuel that using something other than fossil fuels requires not only improvements in battery technology - which at this point may be maturing more quickly now than even two years ago - it also requires significant upgrades in the electrical grid itself. See:
As I understand it, upgrading the the electrical grid will cost money and take time. Until that happens I will be surprised to see electrical vehicles take up a significant share of the auto market, and until they do I think we have to assume the fossil fuel industry is in charge. Scientific American: Will Electric Cars Wreck the Grid?
Unless you were thinking of fueling the automobile by some other means? Clean Technica: Southern California Edison Offers Insight Into Impact Of Electric Vehicles On Grid
The power drain argument against electric cars is very weak, solutions have already been determined.
All that's needed is to have the cars pull their power at times of lower load, which is during the night. They also could use the car batteries to reduce the peak load (around 5-6pm I think?), which would help the electric industry, as the peak load the lines have to be designed for won't be as high. No links, as it's something I saw ~5 years ago on television.
Is it weak? Is the electrical infrastructure and its carrying capacity uniform nationwide relative to current demand? I don't know what the numbers are, but it seems reasonable to presume that on a hot summer night in southern California demand might not fall to far from capacity now. And given that our entire economy, rightly or wrongly, is predicated on a premise of growth one tends to expect electrical demand to follow an upward trajectory even in an absence of electric vehicles - assuming: the economy itself is healthy and no alternative form of energy has displaced electricity's share of the energy market. that in turn suggests that anywhere where the electrical grid is operating during any part of the year at peak capacity, an increase in demand represents a problem in demand of a solution. I don't dispute that those solutions do exist, simply whether or not they are already in place. The premise of the article above was that fossil fuels had reached a tipping point, and the author makes a strong case regarding coal - but there remain significant sources of carbon from fossil fuels that in my view have yet to see a down turn in demand of any meaningful significance.