Coal and oil went through this same transition.

First I will consider coal as it went through this first. Coal isn't exactly new, people expecially in ecosystems lacking wood had known about rocks that burn but stink for thousands of years. The Romans didn't use coal on any large scale, and "peak wood" production is believed by many to have capped their empire. They DID use coal in Britain to some extent, but never enough to displace their insatiable demand for wood.

A few centuries after the collapse of the Roman Empire came a European population expansion made possibly by of all things a new plough-the moldboard plough that made heavy, muddy soils the Roman plough could not handle farmable. Between demand for lumber, demand for farmland, and demand for firewood in Europe's cold winters, the forests of Europe were quickly being denuded. As firewood grew more and more expensive, coal began displacing wood. This was so fast that some early surface mines were played out by the end of the Middle Ages.

Had that coal not existed, it's probable that most or even all of Europe's forests would have been cut for firewood. Only now would any old growth be returning in Europe, and that's assuming humans didn't just keep clearing whole forests.

The only thing is, coal is an even dirtier fuel than firewood. As cities grew, sulfurous smoke became a real problem so much that things like silver utensils quickly tarished.
It was not until the mid 20th century that electrostatic precipitators and baghouses on coal burning power plants began to get a handle on the smoke problems. Of course this did noting about the open CO2 circuit, which is totally differnt than the closed circuit of burning firewood no faster than it grows.

Burning firewood faster than it grows though might be a double hit, worse than coal due to the removal of carbon sinks from the environment, and traces of human-caused climate change have been around since people first started using fire. More on this later...

Petroleum similarily had small scale uses for a couple thousand years but was a niche product. Then came the growing demand for whale oil for lamps for indoor lighting in the 1800's. This led to an explosion of whale hunting, which came within a whisker of making most whale species extinct. It was petroleum that stopped this: someone figured out how to distill petroleum to get a usable lamp oil (kerosene) from it. This played a major role in killing off the whale oil industry just as whales were becoming endangered. The much smaller whale meat industry persisted. At about this time, Arctic ice destroyed a couple of whaling fleets pursuing whales to ever-more remote refuges, and due to competition from kerosene there was no longer enough money to rebuild the fleets crushed by the polar cap as winter ambushed the whalers north of Point Barrow, Alaska.

Act II for Petroleum came by chance: while electric lighting killed the demand for lamp oil, the refining of kerosene had produced a waste product that was too dangerous to include in lamp oil so it was dumped into rivers. This was gasoline.

Overlapping with this era was early experiments in "horseless carriages." Once they became practical to use, these early cars were promoted as anti-pollution devices! The use of horseless carriages in cities meant horses were no longer needed on city streets, thus removing the stench and flies of urban horse shit piles.
This anti-pollution aspect was valid so long as cars were used in the numbers and for the purposes horse carriages were, but that didn't last very long.

Electric, steam, and internal combustion all had their market segments. Internal combustion came to rule the roost, but as it grew it was necessary to be able to greatly scale up fuel production.

Henry Ford had originally planned to run the Model T on ethanol, readily made on any farm but not in unlimited quantities. Then he and other carmakers realized that the waste being thrown into rivers by the kerosene industry (e.g. Standard Oil) was usable as motor fuel and cheap.

Demand for gasoline then rapidly overwhelmed demand for kerosene, and refiners now put the heaviest hydrocarbons into gasoline they could get away with. When cars started knocking (detonation) under load, nobody knew why save that the problem got worse the more compression was used. More compression meant more power and less fuel consumption, but only about 4-1 could be used. Ten to one is common today and 8-1 was common in 1975. The knocking was found to be from detonation, essentially the compressed fuel-air mix detonating supersonically as dynamite does, not burning subsonically as gunpowder does.

To give you an idea what this does, if a high explosive shell detonates in the barrel of an artillery piece, the barrel quite often bursts, even with nothing ahead of the shell holding pressure. The cylinder of a piston engine is esentially a cannon barrel and the piston is a projectile permanently attached to a crank,

Blending 10-30% ethanol into the roughly 50 octane gas of the time could stop the destructive knocking, but GM's experimentors considered the amount of ethanol needed impractical. Experimentation led them to the public policy disaster of tetra-ethyl lead, costing several generations about 5 points of IQ for everyone. Leaded gas was banned soon after introduction, but oil and auto industry lobbyists were just too powerful so the ban only lasted a year.

What killed off lead was a massive increase in other pollutants from an ever-growing number of cars, forcing the use of catalytic converters. Car use had mushroomed far beyond what people had ever done with horse carriages. The same anti-pollution device that got the horse shit off city streets also blew away limits on how many carriages there could be in a city. On top of that, racist whites moved into suburbs fleeing school desegregation, fueling a storm of suburban sprawl.

By this time, the oil industry had learned to make high-octane gas without lead, and Amoco had had high octane unleaded for years for unrelated reasons at that time. Lead was removed from car and boat gasoline, but it's STILL in some aircraft and racing gas!) C

Catalytic converters and computerized fuel injection limited carbon monoxide, unburned hydrocarbons, and oxides of nitrogen. Slowly the air began to clear but then something else happened: yet more growth.

Today, smog is on the rise again, as more and bigger cars overwhelm the gains from catalytic converters and computerized engines. Electric cars help, but so long as the power to run them comes from coal or gas, the power plants are also such large smog emitters some EPA "noncompliance zones" requiring things like auto emissions inspections are being overwhelmed from upwind by power plant emissions and their air just can't take any further additions.

Then there's global warming: we humans are now so far off the track for emitting no more CO2 than our plants can absorb that in the absence of a well-organized and planned program of degrowth as well as decarbonization, we are basically already committed to climate catastrophe.

This can kill the elephants saved by plastic, the forests saved by coal, the whales save by kerosene-and many or even most of US in a worst case scenario,