Yes but where is the profit?
All joking aside there’s so much the US claims to want to do that would be easy to accomplish with some government investment. No EV adoption? Build a charging network. No offshore wind? Build offshore transmission hubs. No domestic solar industry? Build panel manufacturing capacity.
Of course it isn’t viable under our version of capitalism unless there’s a mechanism for some rich shitheads to engage in exploitation from day 1.
What’s funny is they could easily sell these things off to private investors if they felt like it, like this isn’t even incompatible with capitalism. It’s just keynesianism.
Like their darling MIC got their start this way. State investment solves the chicken and egg problem. But of course that would require a modicum of planning, continuity in government, and God forbid waiting five years before getting a return on investment. Or just being willing to accept a 0% ROI with the payoff being social good.
China stays winning
The rival bourgeois factions don’t align on this type of investment and prefer to subsidize owners directly and indirectly instead of customers and consumers. The productive capacity took monumental efforts by China to the point where they are almost fully self-sufficient in their supply chains. The US and Europe having offshored their supply chains can’t just make a new chip or battery factory because they still have to get components and raw materials from other countries. I think it’s so bad that even the MIC would be nonproductive if Russia and China completely cutoff exports of advanced materials like semiconductors and titanium
Sure but I’m sure that any foreign suppliers would be happy to sell raw materials to a US based SEO. China loves to do that type of stuff bc they realize economics is not a competition or a zero sum game, when one place prospers we all prosper
You are totally right of course, like everything else here we are sabotaged by our overlords’ greed
Take the transmission hub example, a private investor says why would I spend a billion dollars building a transmission hub for an offshore wind farm that doesn’t exist? Meanwhile the wind farm developers say why would we build a wind farm where there’s no transmission?
The government could do this no problem, it’s not even particularly complicated, just laying undersea cables. But bc we are allergic to public investment we get spiderman pointing at spiderman
I saw this CNBC video on the Chinese EV industry and it showed how BYD has a fully vertically integrated production model and that’s how it can undercut the competition on price and quality. The report also said that BYD got $3.7b in subsidies between 2018-2022 almost as if US automakers including Tesla don’t get any subsidies.
US automakers get a ton of subsidies, they just do shit like raising dividends, or in the case of Musk 56 billion dollar pay packages
China added more solar panels in 2023 than US did in its entire history
I love to see it. I wonder who the US will what about next after China gets their pollution under control. I’ve looked it up and almost everywhere I’ve looked has been adding more renewable capacity more aggressively than the US. That includes Honduras, who we tried to destabilize not all that long ago. This place is embarrassing.
“Chinese electricity consumption is at an all time high, what will this mean for the climate?”
“China is building unused
citieselectric chargers for which there aren’t enoughresidentselectric cars. Here’s how that means they’re totally an inefficient dictatorship on the verge of crumbling for the past 20 years.”
Absolutely beautiful execution of the “just doing things” model of not being evil. With the knowledge that this is the only place on the Internet where I could imagine asking this question:
Where does China get the cobalt needed for EVs? Are they exploiting the fuck out of South America and doing overseas cringe?
China has some modest cobalt reserves in its own country that it’s rapidly expanding extraction of, but they do also have significant ownership of cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Tenke Fungureme and others). The DRC is where 60-80% of the world’s cobalt is extracted, and where ~50% of the world reserves are.
So it seems pretty likely they’re involved in some degree of overseas cringe. Though the choices are admittedly limited, and I couldn’t find any explicit reports of wrongdoings, the ethics of the suppliers are dubious at best.
I’m afraid I don’t have links, but I remember reading that since China started making moves on cobalt, the rate of ‘artisanal’ cobalt mining (people with no protective gear scraping cobalt ore out with more or less their bare hands, not for an hourly wage but to ‘sell’ the ore back to the mine owners) has plummeted and been replaced by normal mechanized professional mining operations.
Because, while the former is superior if you’re running the mine to extract the maximum profit by paying low wages and selling for a high price, the latter is better if you want to get a very large amount of cobalt very quickly and efficiently so you can build a lot of infrastructure.
Based on my reading artisanal mining has overall significantly reduced from ~50% to ~10% between 2014 and 2020, and during this period, China was equally if not more responsible for dealing with artisanal miners.
However, as of 2020, China simply does not deal with artisanal cobalt mining anymore (jokerfyingly presented as as “bad chinese company bows to pressure and ruins peoples livelihoods (while western ones still use child miners)”).
As of 2023 in fact, it looks like the West is leaning back into the direction of artisanal miners and child labour.
So in China’s defence, it does look like their mining operations are significantly more ethical. Though there’s still an argument for an exploitative nature of the deal, it looks like a better operation than first appeared.
Thanks, I’ll save these links. I guess as ever it’s more nuanced but at least China seems like a positive influence.
I hadn’t seen that last one though - “Is it time to embrace Congo’s artisanal cobalt miners?” fucking hell
Another win for Joe Biden. If he hadn’t announced all of those tariffs on China’s renewable energy 92 days ago, would China have been able to accomplish this?
China: Here world, have plentiful cheap electric cars
Biden: Nuh uh keep your cars to yourself
China: Okay all for us then
And our friends in the global South.
Wish I lived in a country capable of thinking ahead further than the next fiscal quarter
Would love to see how Biden would react if a journalist brought this up next time he touts his electrification initiatives as some big climate policy win.
He would ramble about the Uyghurs and then accidentally drop that the CIA is still funding extremist groups in Xinjiang still or something like that
extremely funny graph
Average China vs America graph
But how many renewable energy tax credits did they sell to casinos?
not a big fan of evs to be honest
I think in the west, they’re overhyped as a solution in their own right. But they are an essential step; to achieve full decarbonisation, combustion engines have to go.
Would you like to elaborate?
I dunno, just think it’s a form of green washing. It’s not like there has been a tremendous shift in how we’re producing electricity, we’re still using coal and fossil fuels.
The only positive is that carbon emmissions from cars are lowered but those are somewhat offset by the increase in electricity production.
Edit: And if the environmental benefits aren’t there, there is zero reason to pick evs over traditional vehicles. Awful to drive, at least in my experience.
It’s green washing if it’s touted as the best strategy to combat climate change, which china doesn’t do rhetorically or with policy. China has over a billion people, and while they have advanced greatly with public transportation, people are still gonna keep driving. They can either keep burning gas or switch to EVs while China continues to make progress with other forms of renewable/sustainable energy. Not to mention other developing countries currently drive diesel vehicles which China seeks to replace.
Meanwhile, the US has resisted highly rated Chinese EVs and every form of renewable energy and not interested in public transportation, and instead they give Elon billions of dollars to jack off and make memes. They are not serious in anything except greenwashing.
burning gas or switch to EVs
Youre still burning gas with evs, someway or another
The turbines in the thermal electrostations are massively more efficient than your petrol vehicle lol
This is true today, but EVs can be recharged by solar and wind power just as much as by coal power, no? Doesn’t an EV unshackle the concept of a car from the concept of burning fossil fuels, even if they are not practically separated today?
Don’t get me wrong, I fucking hate cars. But there’s no putting the toothpaste back into the tube, and I don’t think we can complain that China is underinvesting in alternate forms of transportation.
Just one cantaloupe’s thoughts
Yes I am aware of how electricity is made
No need to be snarky. You read my comment and then replied not addressing any of my points, as if you hadn’t registered them.
china doesn’t view EVs as the primary solution
China is progressing towards other, more sustainable forms of energy and transportation
the US is not interested in any single alternative
while most Chinese takes climate change seriously
Not sure what more you want from me
About 30% of energy in China is from sustainable sources, and that percentage gets higher every year.
Because many EVs are charged during peak production times, the percentage saved by EVs is probably even higher. So you’re burning 30%+ less gas.
No need to be snarky. You read their comment and then replied not addressing any of their points, as if you hadn’t registered them.
I don’t need to address them because I don’t find any wrong with them, they just have nothing to so with what I’m saying
As tech improves it will get better. Itxs easier to build small scale individual uses right now. That is helping to develop batteries at scale which will eventually greatly improve efficiency of plants and will eventually have full scale solar arrays smart grids and battery plants. Peaking power and crap-it-all-ist generating on demand for maxinum short term profts is something that needs to change as a mindset.
China is going to do it first. Once they put us to shame because we’re 20-50 years behind and then maybe we’ll get to what we should have done. But we need to be spanked and humiliated first.
even if the only benefit from EVs is future proofing and transferring carbon debt from the car to the power grid, that’s still a huge boon since you can reduce a power grid’s CO2 production
the moment cold fusion is solved every single EV becomes near-zero emission, the same cannot be said for carbon emitting cars, and for that reason alone every country with the means to do it should be trying to make sure the future average citizen’s cars can run on electricity
Forget fusion, China already has a significant portion of its national electrical grid on solar or nuclear. And while those aren’t zero emission energy sources, they’re pretty damn close to it.
There are significant forms of pollution and carbon emissions associated with manufacturing EVs, especially their batteries, but between all of this China is both increasing their infrastructure and meaningful tackling emissions all at once.
Like Ryan said, it is green washing if it’s viewed as the end to climate change. The best solution is mass public transit and ending fossil fuel use.
The efficiency of fossil fuel power plant production is greater than the efficiency of a single ICE car, so the overall emissions are lower, but emissions will grow the more people drive.
Now if the power source changes from fossil fuels, then the emissions go down a lot, except for what is needed to exploit resources to make the cars and the power production.
it is green washing if it’s viewed as the end to climate change.
I don’t think this is the definition of green washing. Something doesn’t have to be the be all and end all solution to climate change to be a form green washing.
The efficiency of fossil fuel power plant production is greater than the efficiency of a single ICE car, so the overall emissions are lower, but emissions will grow the more people drive.
I think this is a reply that would change my mind on the effectiveness of evs and would like to see any studies that proove this.
Though I get a feeling you’re just trying to be anti-China for some reason or other.
Though I get a feeling you’re just trying to be anti-China for some reason or other.
This is what happens when you’re on a hair trigger about everything China. I’m not anti-China.
Maybe, but this is pretty basic stuff that you’re asking others to Google after a rough start to the thread making it seem like China’s approach deserved the same derision as western approaches without any real knowledge on the subject. That behavior is all too common with reactionaries.
Just be better in the future, either avoid the western anti-Chinese BS that taught you this line of reasoning or think skeptically about claims that China is just as bad or worse on climate change. And Google once you get pushback instead of the innocent “I just need someone to source me claims” act. If you don’t find the info, then ask. I found the result I shared with you by googling “energy efficiency of EVs”, so not like this was hard work or something
Which EV(s) have you driven?
A chevy RUV i think, forget the name. Yeah, before you say, i know chevy sucks lol
Jiayou!
But at what cost?
Hey we gave tons of subsidies for EVs but to be pragmatic we left the charging network up to private crap-it-all which did crap.
