I personally believe that a strong set of taxes based on the polluter pays principle can have a tremendous effect on the actual use of energy. Regarding transportation; electric vehicles are starting to grow exponentially over here: BEV are battery-dependant electric vehicles, as opposed to plug in hybrids on the right. Those two massive peaks on the right graph were two tax breaks for plug-in hybrids that was largely a miserable waste of Dutch taxpayers' money. But it shows that you can get people to move towards alternatives. With rapidly improving battery and charging capacities as well as an expanding public charging network there's certainly a dent to be made in those transportation graphs. The models I help build put EV adoption at 10% by 2025.
Is there data available on what effect those sales have had on emissions from personal cars or what the expected emissions are in out years? The article mentions the flat demand in the electric industry. Flat demand makes it easy to replace higher cost, older power plants with newer ones (which by happy coincidence are lower emission). My assumption is the number of miles driven continues to climb, and the emissions saved by EVs will be offset by more usage from traditional cars.