Zim, Agreed. On the other hand, the article also makes clear that its projection is based on oil being the transport base. It says "Electric vehicles" are a complete non-starter for the US, due to all the critical minerals being in Russian (and other) hands.
I posted the article because I've been saying for twenty years that exporting our manufacturing & manufacturing tech and manufacturing JOBS to China was idiotic and would eventually have to reverse (or try to). Now, that was before electric vehicles were even a glimmer in Musk's eye, I think.
I thought this was an interesting thesis, especially its mention of how Mexico was now more efficient than Canada and might lower labor cost even further by outsourcing, in turn, to Columbia, and maybe Cuba.
There is actually quite a bit of oil in Columbia, and other places as well. Maybe not the seeming infinite quantities of major fields in the past, but enough to make a difference in the decades ahead, especially if humankind became more conservative of use (rail instead of trucks, better insulation, etc.).
I don't know if this stuff is going to happen, but I thought it an interesting article - and in line with a more optimistic future than what WEF + DemonRats have in mind for us.
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P.S. As I said above, I've been saying for almost 20 years that eventually the JIT/offshore to China system would collapse; it was completely unsustainable from the beginning -- doubly so with China being the main manufacturing hub, as China was *always* more our mortal enemy than Russia.
But there is another part to the insanity: the whole business of increasingly crappy, throwaway, PLASTIC everything. I also expect that repairability will have to come back and single use/ non-recyclable plastic use will have to plummet to an almost unimagineable extent...probably back to something approaching 1970 levels. That part is still to come, but I expect it will come. We may yet live to see the return of wax-paper while single use & short-lifetime plastics become rather rare. The non-renewable nature of petroleum was always going to be a problem. But now we are beginning to realizing we are fouling our own nest, because plastic is both toxic and persistant to a level scarcely considered possible even a decade ago. So the future is NOT likely to be very plastic. We will probably always use petroleum based plastic for certain semi-permanent, low wear, UV-protected custom parts (I think 3D-printing is just getting started). But way more than 50% of current plastic use needs to go away, and soon; probably to be replaced by a return to metal parts and more natural materials such as natural rubber, woven fabrics, and probably even wax paper. There may yet be some sort of breakthroughs to plant-based plastic-like materials for packaging, etc....but that is mostly a hope (it is hard to imagine the food industry going back to more limited shelf lives such as we had in the 1950s-1980s.
All my imaginings, of course. But plastic everything was always a sub-optimal idea. And now that we are beginning to get an inkling of the incredible high toxicity and non-recyclability of virtually all plastic...well, I think the end of the plastic age could happen really, really (almost shockingly) fast.
http://www.nrdc.org/stories/single-use-plastics-101
PPS. I used to be a pretty much laissez-faire capitalist. However, I've come gradually to realize that with corporations wanting to externalize costs on the one hand, and far more than half the world population having an IQ below 105, really free markets don't work (and neither does most Democracy). So, I favor taxing the isht out of most plastics. Using plastic in place of recyclable materials including glass, metal, rubber (from trees), and natural fabrics IN ORDER TO SAVE COST needs to stopped, and stopped fast. Tax plastic until NOBODY uses plastic in order to safe packaging costs, at least. We got by without it until the 1970s, we can get by without short-lived plastics again. And, yeah, I think plastics are a far bigger problem than "climate change"; and also far more tractible - it says just about everything that governments are more keen on regulating C02 than single-use plastics.
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