I think China is set up to surpass the US on the even more critical industry of green power.

I think electric cars can help save Detroit. They reflect good decision-making, and there has been bad decision making in the auto industry for so long, in my view.

Solar, for example - which has typically been thought of as so expensive - is cheap when compared with, for example, the cost of cleaning up the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Gulf.

Obviously the horse can still do things that the gas car can never do, and the gas car will always be able to do things the electric car can't do. But they have really different uses and advantages.

There are not a ton of people buying cars - cars are expensive. So people usually go for the cheapest car they can get. And if the price of gasoline falls again, it makes the savings that you get with an electric car harder to realize.

I think China is set up to surpass the US on the even more critical industry of green power.

What oil companies don't want you to know is that refineries use a huge amount of electricity in refining gasoline. And that's usually not even figured into reports about gas cars' overall energy use.