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This is one of my go-to examples for successful ethics in engineering

Along with the elimination of leaded gasoline, it serves as proof of successful mutual cooperation as a species, something people often claim is impossible or we have no examples of.

The fact that it became as impactful as it was is also illustrative of two things;

1. Consistent Failure to recognize and then capture global scale high impact externalities prior to harm for consumer products

2. Law of unintended consequences due to lack of holism in the design process (related to the above, lack of incentives to be holistic)

My argument is that Cybernetics being killed in the crib has made human life structurally worse, as the engineering discipline without holism, ignores the causal impact of ignoring systemic inputs - because it slows people down, is hard and doesn't meet "bottom line" demands which are the priority for capital markets funding these types of developments.

True, but it was a much smaller and easier target than, for example, reducing CO2 emissions. It only required some evolutionary changes (remove FCFs) rather than revolutionary changes that also pose an existentially threat to very powerful companies (worldwide oil & gas industry) and require substantiative changes at the national level that are hard to pass politically.
40 years ago Carl Sagan said to stop burning coal and make sure India and China don’t use all their reserves. Imagine how much more time we would have if we’d have listened.

https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI?si=Fj1DaPEimOwwEvr9

We should be very close to peak coal sometime this decade.

At some point it might be appropriate to frame the problem as being with "very large companies," but we're still at a point where the technology (mostly storage) isn't quite ready.

Coming from a US perspective, politicians aren't helping, either. If climate change were really a concern, the US wouldn't be putting a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs, and there'd be a large government push for building out the charging network.

There is a large government push to build out the charging network.

“Biden’s $7.5 billion investment in EV charging has only produced 7 stations in two years”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/03/28/...

What's sad is most of the EV hesitancy is because of range anxiety, charging stations are the fix, and building a charging station is relatively easy.
That headline is quite misleading; if you read the article you find that the issue is that it takes time for States to come up with a funding proposal for something that is brand new for them. There's a lot of lead time required for these types of projects.
That’s sort of entirely different discussion.

My point was we are building 500,000 additional chargers. I’m sure we’ll get there.

Once done, it should significantly increase EV adoption.

They removed CFCs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbon
I don't know why I got downvoted for a minor correction of an acronym along with a link explaining what it means.
> elimination of leaded gasoline

USA is still the main producteur of Tetraethyllead (the additive used to make this gasoline) and sell it to Iraq and Yemen where it’s legal and widely used.

Edit: 3 years late, I’m happily wrong. Thanks Solstice.

I thought it had been phased out in 2021: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/un-leaded-gasoline-1.6158216
What does "Cybernetics" mean in this context?
What it means in every context: the study of self-modifying systems. Nicky Case has a (very very introductory-level) interactive primer: https://ncase.me/loopy/
OP here, I would refer to the other responses as being largely sufficient

It’s the general concept that you pursue understanding, to the fullest extent of the state of hypothetical measurement, the extent to which your actions impact the entirety of everything globally or universally