In Other News:
US moves to dominate the global VHS video market once and for all.
Eat shit Beta max!
President Trump promises US taxpayers will reimburse Blockbuster videos for rebuilding video marketing infrastructure, pledging an “All of Government” approach, and the full strength of the US military will be mobilized to enforce and retain market share.
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China’s energy strategy suggests a different framing—one that looks far more like the long-standing playbook advanced by Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI): don’t fight oil directly. Get more out of each barrel through efficiency, electrification, and better system design until demand structurally disappears. When my mentor, Atul Arya, left bp, he did a peak oil demand road show in 2010 with the Society of Automotive Engineers. My friend Arjun Murti finds all of this impossible given that 7 billion in the world don’t enjoy the same energy consumption as the “lucky one billion.” As I have pointed out to him, oil has had decades to accomplish this goal and they really aren’t working very hard on it now.
If China succeeds at achieving their peak oil demand this year, their domestic success will be embraced by other oil importing countries that are looking to shift their oil import dollars into domestic technology investments. Oil demand will never go away, but we are seeing a long-term erosion of oil’s economic relevance.
Oil markets suffer from the same blind spot electricity markets once did: they rarely treat efficiency as a competing resource.
In the 1980s, power system planners were forced to compare new generation against negawatts—energy you never have to produce because efficiency is cheaper. In oil markets, physical barrels are modeled in extraordinary detail, while “negabarrels”—barrels permanently displaced by better design—are mostly ignored.
That omission creates two serious errors:
- Supply-side shocks are overstated, because demand is assumed to be rigid (inelastic)
- Demand-side opportunity is underinvested in, because efficiency is not treated as an asset class
This isn’t a small oversight, it leads to a fundamental mispricing of oil.
As Amory Lovins has documented for decades, the levelized cost of displacing oil through end-use efficiency has fallen dramatically. Today with cheap Chinese electric vehicles exports, almost every oil importing nation is choosing electric vehicles over internal combustion engine (ICE) cars. India, Mexico, Indonesia and Brazil now have a higher EV sales marketshare than Japan.
The sale of ICE cars peaked in 2017, but fuel sales peak when the overall number of ICE vehicles start falling in the overall vehicle fleet which is coming soon. More importantly, people shift most of their miles to their new cars. That means that oil traders should be spending less time on new oil supply and more on accelerating efficiency trends.
China appears to understand this dynamic better than many oil-exporting nations because it spends $300B a year importing crude oil. Today it is exporting over 2 million EVs to oil importing nations around the world.
- The global race is on. 39 countries have reached an EV sales share larger than 10% in 2025, a third of which are outside Europe. In 2019, there were only four countries that had reached this milestone, all within Europe. Notably, China reached over 50% EV sales share for the first time this year. Between January and October 2025, EVs have made up over a quarter of global new car sales, up from less than 3% in 2019.
- ASEAN emerges as a new leader in EV adoption. Viet Nam has doubled its EV sales share since 2024 to reach close to 40% in 2025, overtaking the UK and the EU for EV sales penetration. Thailand has exceeded 20% EV sales share for the first time so far this year, up from 1% in 2019. Singapore, Thailand and Viet Nam have all reached higher battery electric vehicle sales shares than the EU average.
- Emerging markets are overtaking advanced economies like the US and Japan. India, Mexico and Brazil now have a higher EV sales share than Japan, while Indonesia’s EV sales share has reached 15% this year, overtaking the US for EV penetration.
- Chinese EV exports are finding new markets outside the OECD. Since July 2023, non-OECD markets have been responsible for all the growth in Chinese EV exports, with Mexico, Brazil, UAE and Indonesia emerging as top destinations in 2025.
“The next layer of efficiency [of EVs] will come from light weighting, aerodynamics, and integrative design.”
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We have to get over the hump of range anxiety that’s getting people to buy bigger-battery EVs. The shorter-range version of my 2025 Leaf (40kWh) was only available in the lower trim level (S). I did not want the extra 400lb of curb weight for the 60kWh battery that came with the trim level I had before (SV), so I gave up the on-board navigation in order to have a sprightlier car. (Eh, Android Auto connected to my phone works OK.)
More chargers and faster charging will go a long way to get people comfortable with “small” batteries.
I think a few things will happen to make EVs far more ‘normal’ for people to buy in a few years than now.
– knowing other people who own EVs and like or love them, especially suburban folks who can charge at home
– more used EVs hitting the market every year after some of the new-buyer premium is shaved down
– continued build-out of public and semi-public charging infrastructure as retailers and restaurants realize charging time could be time people come in and spend in their establishment.
That last bit is important because the switch from luxury/performance toy to mass market depends on ALL drivers in a home being comfortable with the sometime case of needing to stop for a charge, at night, in an area they might be unfamiliar with. The old model of charging sites off in some badly-lit spot behind a big box store doesn’t cut it for letting people feel safe with the vehicle. The highway rest stops are getting done, but the drivers who might not be able to charge at home all will need to go ‘somewhere’ and sometimes that could be at night, and alone, and for a fairly long time sitting parked in the car.
Charging in cities is a hurdle, but gas stations are dwindling in cities too – hard to justify the land value just because there are big tanks of explosive material under your one-story structure. And I’d always thought that utilities should get with owners of multi-story parking structures. Take part of the space, put batteries in to balance grid and also power the chargers, so the utility gets local grid stability enhancement, charging can be cheap with solar peaks and nighttime winds, and sell power to car owners. Wall off the battery systems from the vehicle parking and treat it like they treat substations.
I was definitely the low-hanging fruit in 2014: I have my own home and could readily afford a Level 2 charger (11 years later I have never charged anywhere but at home). I don’t take road trips. The only two problems I had with my first Leaf was that it was bigger than I wanted (replacing my Mazda 3) and it didn’t have a sunroof. *pout*
I can see not wanting to charge at night, since I never liked pumping gas at night, but you actually spend less time charging if you don’t try to “top off” (and stopping on a road trip to charge from 20% to 80% actually uses less stop time than charging, say, from 10% to 100% on stops, since it takes much longer to shove in those last electrons).
The US Big 3 automakers, in particular Ford, appear to have conceded the EV race to China and seem to be concentrating on higher performance (horsepower) ICE vehicles and hybrids (https://insideevs.com/news/781883/ford-f-150-lightning-dead/, https://ev.com/news/ford-cancels-next-gen-electric-van-hybrid-strategy-reshapes-ev-roadmap.) This will likely end up contracting their markets primarily to the US so long as the current administration (and future ones) are anti-green energy and pushing fossil fuels.
Solid state batteries, such as https://insideevs.com/news/783380/first-production-ready-all-solid-state-battery-official-specs/, that have been developed have basically solved the problem of range anxiety and battery safety and in the one linked above is “100% green, made from materials that are found everywhere,” making it immune to geopolitical issues. The startup also claims its solid-state cells are cheaper to build than comparable lithium-ion batteries.”