Western country populations seem to be willfully falling for obvious fossil fuel propaganda over and over again. Future generations will rightfully curse our names. (Including today's children.)

Sadly it comes down to "Show me the money."

I vote for change, but I don't have the money to buy electric. Even running costs don't make the difference when it comes to multiple tens of thousands of dollars in purchase price.

I'd love to "care for our environment by buying an electric car". I can't afford to.

Affordable EVs are a solved problem. China has solved it. The world responded by putting up tariffs.

I already own a car. An affordable EV is a thing I'll buy in like 15 more years when my already 20 year old Toyota finally dies maybe.

If I bought it sooner, then my car would just go into the second hand market and do the same thing.

"Affordable" isn't changing anything: I don't need another car, and I'm not going to prematurely crush mine into a cube.

I drive very little, so having a fossil car sitting in the drive is more carbon efficient than buying a new EV that had to be built and shipped.

Somone who drives a lot may be able to scrap their fossil car, buy a new EV and start saving on carbon emissions in a much shorter time than me.

Of course we can motivate ourselves. But they're acting like we did in the 1800s through the mid 1900s. They just build anywhere no matter what. They have no interest in dealing with environmental concerns. The officially released pollution levels in China are mind-boggling and they still do not represent how bad it really is.

You think US manufacturers wouldn't be delighted to just buy a few hundred acres land and start building stuff? They'd do it in a heartbeat. For better and for worse, it is not a level playing field. Conforming to government regulations over here is stifling for a 100-house development in Arkansas, but it's almost impossible in California, Illinois, or New York. Now imagine what it's like to build a huge factory. It is nearly impossible to get permission, and inspections, endangered wildlife concerns, waste removal, etc. handled in under 5-10 years.

Counterpoint: See the speed with which Colossus has been (is being) assembled in Memphis Tennessee. Yes, on an existing industrial site but this is still one damn impressive accomplishment.

https://www.servethehome.com/inside-100000-nvidia-gpu-xai-co...

A data center is much easier than building an industrial factory

This seems like an apples to oranges comparison. They are completely different. Can you provide some specific examples?

They had to build themselves because third parties gave longer timelines.

Is it your thought that is typical for large-scale development?

No, far from typical. But then Elon involved ;-)

This is why Trump has pushed for mass deregulating, America (let alone the west) can't compete against China when our politicians demand that we straight up don't.

So we compete with a highly regulated planned economy by getting rid of regulations?

Gotcha.

The air quality in China is lot better now than a decade ago. The smog was so bad in 2012 and I remembered the AQI hitting 999 (the max it would go) on more than one occasions during Beijing winter.

Went back again in early 2024 and it was so much better, pollution still noticeable on more days than not but at least half the time I spent had AQI below 100.

I was in Shenzhen in 2017 and again recently. The difference is huge. The air quality walking around the street is very good and you never smell gasoline.

True and good on them, but I suspect you’re not hanging out in a lot of the backwater provinces where industrial development is happening

i've been to a lot of smaller cities, provinces, and rural areas in china over the past decade+ and it really has got a lot better everywhere. it's not fake and not limited to a few developed areas

Fantastic! I happily withdraw my point. Thanks for the correction.

I’d argue that vested interests in oil and coal have done more to damage the US’s ability to invest like this than any regulatory red tape.

Huge parts of America hate EVs. There is endless debate about nuclear vs clean energy vs coal, which prevents any change from happening.

>There is endless debate about nuclear vs clean energy vs coal, which prevents any change from happening.

Meanwhile coal has been on a clearly uneconomical trend for decades, and no amount of bitching by 60k coal miners can prevent that fact, no amount of crying about "woke" policy can prevent other fossil fuels from just being better than coal in every single way.

It's infuriating our country has been strangled by these morons.

They all cry about making America great again, oblivious to the fact that America thrives when it shovels public money into infrastructure like a bad habit. From gifting thousands of square miles of public land to bribe the railroads into building one of the best transportation networks for it's time (also why "america isn't dense enough" is utter horseshit. We connected the coasts before there was anyone living in most of the US), to the interstate which is still unparalleled, to the Postal Service way back in our infancy, to the homesteading project which ensured we have some of the most productive farmland in the world, to the highly educated workforce of the mid 1900s who did the electronics revolution which came about largely because the US navy wanted computers all the way back in WW2, and transistors largely exist so we could have ICBMs, to the millions of electronics experts just set free to build after the war...

America has ALWAYS profited from public investment into infrastructure, both physical and mental, but because a bunch of poorly educated (not a slight, an objective fact) people would rather get black lung like their pappys, we aren't allowed to have nice things.

> Conforming to government regulations over here is stifling for a 100-house development in Arkansas, but it's almost impossible in California, Illinois, or New York. Now imagine what it's like to build a huge factory. It is nearly impossible to get permission, and inspections, endangered wildlife concerns, waste removal, etc. handled in under 5-10 years

Reading this (and I completely agree, it's even worse in Europe), sounds like Chinese "management" implemented Agile on a whole new scale.

The upside of a planned economy is that it can work like the internals of a private company, with one drive, "do what needs to be done". The downside is that it can work like the internals of a private company where you bite the bullet or look for another employer. This is much harder with countries, especially because planned economies are more likely to have taller fences around them.

The flipside of this argument is that it enables Chinese industrial interests to operate on strategies with 10+ year time scales, whereas Western markets seem to focus on the next few quarters. This is probably very efficient for some businesses, but not for big industrial corporations with long development timelines.

> Now imagine what it's like to build a huge factory. It is nearly impossible to get permission, and inspections, endangered wildlife concerns, waste removal, etc. handled in under 5-10 years.

This explains why the Tesla gigafactory in Nevada (announced in Sept 2014) still isn't operational...

The bread and butter of progress is competition and I think a lot of American companies “won” like Boeing or Intel in the 90s and no one else could compete.

Unfortunately winning is disastrous because it makes you complacent.

Perhaps the most flagrant and dumbest example is Internet Explorer 6.

I do not approve of raising tariffs on foreign vehicles because it will dull our edge in the long term. Protectionism is a short term bandaid.

Tariffs are a good way to ensure you still have a domestic capability. If Germany/korea/japan/China outcompete all US auto makers and they die, along with it goes a ton of jobs, manufacturing knowledge & capacity, cultural influence, an ability to keep capital flowing domestically, downstream suppliers, and ability to change factories from autos to military equipment in wartime. If China just keeps taking industry, then all we have left is an outpouring of all capital and a bunch of “content creators” left. Not a good prospect.

US auto companies already try to compete globally in situations with/without tariffs. That provides plenty of competition too.

I completely agree with you, but it’s still funny how we were ok with the companies moving the jobs out of NA (so, we lost all the things you’ve listed) to save themselves money. But when it comes to saving money for the consumers, suddenly we’re not allowed to do the same thing, because it doesn’t help the bottom line.

Intel was famously not complacent. Perhaps a long lapse starting a decade ago. But even then “complacence” was not the problem. Ditto for Boeing. Managerial focus on just milking the cow has been the fundamental problem: and they milked frantically—not complacently.

One could perhaps say that short-termism is complacency about the future.

I can't tell if I'm missing sarcasm here but ...

Intel was paying customers Billions a year not to use their competitors products in the early 2000s. So not complacent about breaking the law to stifle competition but also complacent about actually building competitive chips that could win in the market.

Well even with 100% tariffs BYDs new sub 10k vehicles will be far cheapet than anything else the US market has to offer

> our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change

The US and EU are long off-peak carbon emissions (emissions even decreased during the Trump administration I, even using a trendline ignoring COVID). The biggest emitter right now is China, and it's emissions are growing not shrinking, and a considerable amount of that (including 90% of the worlds new coal plants) goes to projects like this.

Kinda, but we’re not really in a position to blame them right? To some extend, sure, but that’s easy to say when you’ve already got yours.

What does blame have to do with anything? Emissions are emissions.

The tone of the message feels kinda like ‘China bad, look at all those emissions’

It’s possible that was not the intent.

Exactly: emissions are emissions. Reducing our own is just as good as other people reducing theirs. Plus then we can credibly badger others about their emissions, show them how to do it, and impose tariffs and sanctions when they don't.

China is building more renewable energy than the rest of the world combined. At this point there is no “let’s just reduce our emissions by 30% or so and hope things work out” plan that’s compatible with stopping worst-case outcomes, there is only a “let’s replace every single energy and fuel source with non-emitting ones on a ridiculously short timescale” plan. Insofar as we have a chance of doing that, it’s because of what China is doing right now.

To the extent that they’re using fossil fuels to build the infrastructure for this renewable tech, I’m completely fine with that. That’s much better than using it to build iPhones or consumer nonsense. Insofar as they’re building a renewable grid backed by modern dispatchable coal and they’re also building out massive storage manufacturing capability and their emissions are on track to decline, I’m also fine with that.

ETA: China’s emissions appear to be peaking and entering a structural decline. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2453703-clean-energy-ro...

China's emissions are continuing to climb sharply:

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?country=CHN~USA~IND...

The New Scientist article is terribly misleading. It suggests China's emissions have peaked because of a few months of reported stable numbers. What they don't tell you is that such periods have happened many times before. Between 2014-2016 Chinese emissions were stable or even fell slightly, according to their not very reliable data. Then it started climbing strongly again, even as US emissions dropped by a billion tonnes/year between 2008-2023.

So there's no evidence China is turning anything around or is on track to decline. You can't extrapolate a few months out to decades in the future, and the New Scientist should know that.

The analysis in New Scientist isn't based historical trends. It's a causal analysis based on the rapid deployment of new low-carbon generation on China's grid, which is being deployed at rates higher than expected demand. Of course you could be right -- maybe forward demand will be much higher than anticipated, or maybe all of those solar panels will turn out not to be plugged in or something. But you need to make a stronger argument for this than one that just casually glances at a historical time series.

Yes, but such stories have been pushed for many years. If we look at the period before the 2017+ rampup in emissions we can see the same sorts of talk about China's solar ramp:

https://www.google.com/search?q=china+solar+deployment&sca_e...

"China's Solar Surge Presents Future Opportunity"

"China ramps up renewable energy deployment"

"Why China Is Leading The World In Solar Power"

etc. Solar can't replace fossil fuels so it's not unexpected that Chinese emissions would continue to grow.

The difference during those earlier times was that the amount of generation installed was still relatively small. Those articles use the term “future” because the hypothesis was that if exponential trends persisted, eventually generation would start to rival growth in demand. That appears to be actually happening now.

And solar (and wind and nuclear) absolutely can replace fossil fuels. What they can’t do is replace 100% of fossil fuels until storage is cheap and plentiful. With expanded grid capacity and dispatchable fossil generation, a 90%+ low-carbon grid is entirely feasible.

> To the extent that they’re using fossil fuels to build the infrastructure for this renewable tech, I’m completely fine with that.

Building renewable tech is such a small percentage of chinese output. And besides, at a very small ~10-20% premium you can get far more efficient and durable solar panels from South Korea. And by doing so, you can buy your solar panels from a country that is past carbon peak.

EU supports China economy by donting their products from EU citizen taxes. As EU citizen, you can ask donations for your new photovoltaic panels or EV up to 8000€.

> It's terrifying because we (in the West) can't seem to motivate ourselves to do anything like this on the same timescale

The sad thing is, we still can if we want to. When Russia throttled down the natural gas pipelines into the EU, it took them mere weeks until the first new floating natural gas was put into operation. And they've collectively dumped an astonishing number of new terminals into the North Sea since then, all at the same time. Germany alone spent $6B in infrastructure investments before that first winter without Russian gas.

We could if we wanted to. But by and large, we don't want to.

> It's great news in the sense that this new energy storage and EV production capacity is (part of) our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change.

How so ?

There are 1.4b vehicles on earth, petrol or batteries it just doesn't work out, especially if we keep using 2000-3000kg metal boxes to move 80kg meat bags 1hr a day and let them rot in a parking for the remaining 23 hours.

Not even talking about the fact that cars are but a fraction of the problem anyways