May you live in interesting times, eh.

Many of these probably do very little miles but car reliability is now so high a car can be run for 20 years. In India, with lower GDP, cars are likely to be kept going even longer.

If the oil price drops, these old autos get even cheaper to run. Unless there is a program to remove them from the roads, petrol powered cars will be with us for decades to come.

In India the middle income car owner will bitterly resent having their functional vehicle forced off the road, while the poor would be the losers if the government provided subsidies to car owners.

A 100% electric fleet in only 13 years in India is nearly as unlikely as the Saudis dropping oil without becoming an impoverished desert state.

This is why the USA will get devastated by Iran when the USA attacks. Iran has designed and made thousands of inexpensive, reliable and accurate missiles and other weapons whereas the USA has a few very expensive ego boosters for the USA officers.

The main reason I strongly dislike the F-35 is, it is extremely complex and based on my almost 45 years of engineering experience, I know that complex stuff breaks a lot. From a practical engineering standpoint, the F-35 is a total mess and I will not be surprised that it fails spectacularly in combat.

BTW – USA companies have out-sourced the knowledge of how to build low cost reliable products to Asia.

– All carbon energy that can be harvested for very little cost has already been used up. All the carbon energy left requires more and more costs to harvest. Long term the cost to produce a kilowatt of carbon energy will have to go up.

BUT . . .

– The cost of non-carbon energy is decreasing every day as the technology evolves. That is, non-carbon energy technology is following a curve very similar to CPUs, memory chips, image sensors, etc.

– Right now we have a carbon energy glut because conversion from carbon energy to non-carbon energy plus massive energy conservation has drastically lowered the demand for all forms of energy much faster than most people anticipated and that trend is accelerating.

As a result, as professor Cole noted Saudi Arabia is sitting on an asset that is losing value by the day, especially as most countries (but not the USA) have figured out for any country to thrive by 2050, it MUST be energy self-sufficient so their wealth is kept at home and not drained by others.

So by 2050 at the latest, Saudi Arabia will have no market for its oil, just like coal producers are running out of markets for their product right now. Within a few short years there will be no active coal mines in the USA because they will not even be able to give coal away (unfortunately, due to USA politics, the coal workers will be in terrible shape – instead of fighting market forces the USA should be educating and moving coal miners to other parts of the USA).

I helped designed some of the technology we have today and I see non-carbon energy following the SAME PATH which will make carbon energy producers into the buggy whip makers of today.