The price of oil has varied quite a lot in the long run. The spikes are some sort of world wide events.
Business news are always trying to scare you. They want you to support the "more drilling" candidate.
That was this week. As far as politics goes, the Trump vs Biden issues are burying all long term plans. Biden is right to promote electric cars. But even the politicians supporting less emissions have not quite looked at this well enough. Consumers have, and many want a plug in hybrid. This is mainly because they want to be independent. There may be the luxury end, but most of are going to charge at home, not at Tesla charging stations. They do travel, though, and most are used to finding gas stations, even if they charge the car at home. Those will remain, and interstate roads will have plenty of gas stations. The electric charging stations will be at work places and shopping centers.
Where the politics is going wrong is in supporting electric truck transport. Not even California is going to get that anytime soon. We had decades to support electric trains, but those are not going to go far. Mostly commuter trains. But we could certainly go for an electric train going East and West. It would have to be a set of parallel tracks with normal trains going North and South from it. None of these things are going to happen with the current Democrats and Republicans fighting for abortion and shutdowns. So I'll just leave that for now.
But the cars are coming. The barrel price of oil will not get to 150 dollars soon and will not stay there for long. But in the coming decades, it will. The price of oil can only go up. It will never come down to the 1900s prices again. We won't give up on oil, but it will be expensive. Large vehicles will continue use it and consumer prices for retail goods will reflect it.
The consumer is going to go for the plug in hybrid for the next car. Drivers will become more frugal and will try to limit driving to less than 50 miles a day.
Googling for plug in hybrid with 50 mile range gets me...
Ford, Lexus and Volvo, Mitsubishi and BMW. But all with 35-40 mile range. Karma GS-6 will go 61 miles. But that is more of a sports car. Not a people's car. We are getting there. I predict that some small vehicles will develop. Safety issues will arise. Prices will be worked on, a compromise of price and safety. Since the hybrids and electric cars will both have some weight issues, let us just say that the challenge is similar. But the weight issue can be addressed by much smaller vehicles. Imagine a car that looks and acts more like an electric bicycle. Or even the type of three wheeled motorcycle we see now. Basically a light vehicle with all the weight other than the battery stripped down.
Just to give some idea of a light weight vehicle, here is one with some calculations made by the physics people. (This is not a hybrid, this a light weight electric). See*
All those will go 50 miles as the technology develops. No technology developed in less than 20 years to this level.
There is also a case to be made for "full hybrid" but the issues are a bit complicated. You may not get politicians to support full hybrids as it will always use gas. LINK:
*PAPER • OPEN ACCESS Lightweight Design and Test of Electric Experimental Car To cite this article: Fei Song et al 2022 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 2185 012046
