Lower fuel costs (or lower costs for the equivilent in electricity not derived from a fuel), but probably not enough to make up for the difference in vehicle costs (at least not unless oil becomes much more expensive), let alone that and the additional infrastructure costs.
Its not just a matter of economies of scale, there are certain things about electric cars that make them likely to be more expensive at any scale. Battery costs will come down, but will remain a significant costs. And since the batteries can't store as much energy per weight or per unit of volume as gasoline, your likely to have less stored energy aboard. You get less range, but you get more effort to increase range to reduce this disadvantage. That extra effort results in things like additional batteries (adding cost, and also adding weight which indirectly adds cost), and extra efforts to streamline vehicles and reduce their weight. These efforts add cost, but probably don't reduce the weight enough to make up for the weigh of the batteries. Also these efforts are the reason for part of the per mile advantage, and if they are generally worthwhile they could be applied to non-electric vehicles as well.
less money flowing to ME countries that seem to grow terrorists
And less flowing in to their efforts to fight terrorists, or to generally keep society stable. This could result in more terrorists. I'm not saying that funneling all of this money to the Middle East is on the net a good thing, or even that its a good thing in the more narrow area of dealing with terrorism, only that it isn't clearly a bad thing in the more narrow area of dealing with terrorism.
less involvement in "foreign entanglements"
Unlikely.
export opportunities
There is no particularly reason to think the overall export opportunities would be increased, they might not even avoid decreasing, considering that your imposing a cost on the US, and also to the extent that you lower imports of oil you lower the amount that gets imported by those oil producing countries. And no, they don't use it all to buy American products, obviously if we didn't have to import the oil, than everything else staying the same, we would have a less negative balance of payments, I'm just pointing out it wouldn't be quite as much less negative, and this point is only a secondary concern. The main point is that you aren't likely to be creating new export opportunities in the first place. |
