Increasing fuel economy for the world by x3 is enough to change the geo-politics of world and reduce the clot of many dictators who run oil based economies. A great accomplishment if the trends predicted by this article indeed take place.

CO2 would also be reduced in this article’s scenario. But I expect that the CO2 warming religion will lose a lot of members in a few years and the majority of the world will not be willing to severely hamper the gross output of the world over this issue. The science behind it has been severely distorted by politics. The models of CO2 warming are not really so good because the world is much more complicated than the models we can make…and this is becoming evident. So the jury is still out…even if the warming is real. But the world will rebel against zealous purists who edict over expensive solutions when the rest of the world has reason to be skeptical of the edict’s effectiveness. People will be willing to pay some extra for insurance in case CO2 warming is correct. But an all or nothing condescending attitude as expressed here and elsewhere will drive people toward the nothing.

Oil has amazing properties that are being used in carbon-fiber technologies, ultra lightweight and strong.

There is nothing wrong with hybrids, but really when we get all this FREE energy from the sun and the wind it sure makes sense to be using it fully.

Buckminster Fuller produced a V8 aluminum bodied Dymaxion Car back in 1933 that got 22mpg and did 120mph and carried eleven passengers. See it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlLZE23EJKs

Fuller said “You can’t make money and sense at the same time, they are mutually exclusive” … and of course we’ve been focused on trying to make money ever since. We’re now starting to move towards “making sense” … and our survival depends on it.

I regularly get over 74MPG in my 2000 Honda Insight. The fact it’s 10 years later and there aren’t ANY cars on the market today that can match that efficiency shows just little the industry cares about fuel efficiency.

So yes, we do need to “move forward to clean energy” — something this study didn’t take on. It may seem modest — but it’s not idiotic — to much more efficiently use the fossil fuels we’re still stuck with while waiting for whatever it takes to “simply to get rid of them all-together,” as DC puts it.

Seriously, why waste the next 25 years making a car more efficient at using a fuel that is limited and hurts our environment? This makes no sense at all.