Sure, but the scale of violence committed by the US and allies is very large. Are there theocratic states recently committing similar levels of violence?
Too often in the past, the oppression done by Middle Eastern governments is used to build political support for their destruction by the West.
I agree all sides are bad. Too many people ate trying to do one side bad, so the other side must be good. We can ask least bad. Sometimes there are no good options.
This year I bought a 5 year old compact electric SUV with 94% reported battery health (gets about 20 miles under its EPA-estimated range) for under $12k.
Huh, how does having options of ICE or EV cars mean high oil prices won't mean people try to use less oil?
If gas prices go up, expensive public EV chargers will be more appealing. I hope you get better infrastructure re: charging soon; here in California (not known for low energy prices nor for infrastructure-building capacity) most fast chargers are between US$0.50 and US$0.70 (£0.37-£0.52) per kWh, so it is definitely possible. (You also need non-fossil-based electricity generation to truly decouple from oil/gas prices.)
I share your worries about industry, though — although trucks, earth-movers, etc could theoretically run on batteries or hydrogen or something, industrial processes using petroleum and natural gas may be around for a lot longer.
When I was referring to ICE vs electric I was referring to personal transportation only.
Sometimes you just _can't_ use less oil. My own situation is that I make 5 sub-100 mile round-trip journeys each week now. It's the poster-child for home charging an EV. It saves me at least £3k a year on petrol alone.
However, I had to pay an additional £7k over and above what I sold my petrol car for (just last week, in fact) in order to get a secondhand EV. I could have gotten a much older, higher mileage one for around the same as I sold my car but that was too big a gamble for me. So I was in a position that I _could_ use less oil by switching. Not everyone has a spare £7k lying around.
I was told by a friend of mine (he's been driving electric for 5 years I think!) that a few years ago, the 92p/kWh fast chargers used to be about 30p. We now have waaaay more of them available and the price has gone up by about a factor of 3x so I don't see the price coming down any time soon and more infrastructure isn't helping in our case.
The UK energy prices are really high too: £0.13/kWh is the global average and we pay £0.27/kWh [0]. So electric isn't always the answer either unless you can get a cheap tariff.
Plus if you need to have a car and you live in a flat, you're only real option is petrol/diesel and a great many people here live in flats.
In terms of industry, it will have some luck changing the last few miles of delivery over to electric. That may be fine though - leave the mega-miles to the diesel trucks and then city and town deliveries could be made by electric vehicles where they only need to do 200 miles of stop-start driving.
Energy isn't free... if we want to power things we need to expend energy somewhere in the chain in order to do so.
I'm American, and I don't use the extra cash flow (in fact, I make sure to keep more money in my checking account than I spend on the credit card, so I can always auto-pay my bill and therefore never pay any interest).
If I could get a debit card that gave me 2% cash back on all transactions, I'd use that instead!
I wonder if some of this will reverse once more electric cars are available on the used market, which are cheaper to fuel and require less maintenance.
Already some of the explosion of non-luxury EVs with >200 miles range around 2020ish are starting to be available used, albeit a bit more expensive than gas counterparts.
If battery degradation isn't too great, maybe in 10 years people can buy 15 year old EVs that are cheap to maintain and run (for those who can accept the tradeoffs of EVs - and that would reduce demand on ICEVs). We'll see.
I think it doesn't have to be insecurity. I drive a Hyundai Kona, and have no particular desire for speed or performance; I'm happy for other people to have sporty, fast cars even if they are modded, but I do get annoyed by very loud vehicles (regardless of performance; e.g. small motorcycles or pickups that are very loud are also annoying).
I'm not blaming OP specifically for this, but I don't think you have to drive a sports car to be allowed to be annoyed by loud cars without it being 'insecurity'.
Adding onions, non-cheese dairy, bacon, chives and/or udon noodles to carbonara sounds delicious. If I am cooking for myself, I care more about that than fidelity to traditional Italian recipes.
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