1.) Yes, automation has been replacing jobs (and creating new ones) since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The difference is that when it destroyed agricultural jobs, for example, it was relatively easy for workers to transfer to new jobs in factories with relatively little training. If you had reasonable manual dexterity and half a brain, you could make the shift in a few weeks. Today, the new jobs being created require VASTLY more education to enter, making the mobility of labour type much more difficult than in the past. This has actually been a growing problem since the mid 1970s, when industrial robotics began eliminating most factory labour and microcomputers began eliminating most secretarial labour. Not coincidentally, that's the point where wages and productivity gains became completely decoupled, as human labour became less valuable. This trend has been accelerating continuously since then, and will continue to accelerate into the next decade -- at the same time as the difficulty of entering new jobs is moving in the other direction. This has now led to pervasive structural unemployment and underemployment; those problems will continue to become worse. Left unchecked, they are fully capable of destabilising societies.

2.) Yes, the apparatus of the oil industry has a long lifespan and will have tremendous inertia, and I think we're in agreement that the balance of power production will be nowhere close to having shifted by then. However by the end of this decade, the writing will very much be on the wall as far as the petrochemicals are concerned, and energy companies and governments will be much more proactive about scrambling for a position (territory and IP-wise) in the post-oil world than they are today -- even though the actual balance of production will probably take a further 20 years to shift to solar.

3.) What's different about the next 10, relative to the last 50? 50 years ago, the Western Democracies hadn't dropped taxes on the rich to historically low levels, leading to the most extreme wealth inequalities in history; hadn't built a domestic surveillance apparatus surpassing the wildest dreams of the East German Stasi; hadn't militarised their police forces; and (fairly brief Red Scares notwithstanding) were more outwardly-directed in their paranoia, rather than declaring perpetual "wars" (largely upon their own populations) in the names drugs and terrorism and such. All of these are corrosive to democracy, and it's pretty obvious to me that toxicity has reached very unhealthy and ultimately unsustainable levels.

[Edit: Just to be clear, I didn't say that Western Democracy will collapse in this decade; I said that its legitimacy will collapse (arguably is collapsing right now), which is something else. This has both internal repercussions in the nature of the political discourse/conflict, and external repercussions in that Western-style Democracy will less and less be what the rest of world aspires to. Also to be clear: I'm a big fan of Western Democracy -- more than any other form of government around -- I just think that in practice, they've been buggering things up pretty badly for the last decade or two, and consequently are going to have an extremely challenging decade relative to much of the rest of the world.]