by johnea | 2025-06-22 22:04:15+00:00
Thank you for your thoughtful reply! (I mean that, I'm not being snarky 8-) I really appreciate it when someone makes the effort to think about a comment and make an earnest reply, in either agreement or dissent. Your reply contains some of both, and from that I think, as you stated in your original reply, a lot of "disagreement" does come down to people wanting similar things, but having different perspectives.

Rather than a quote by quote response, I'm going to try to make a general statement.

I am aware that pretty much all industrial countries do implement some kind of protectionist import policies. As in the original comment, I'm not an absolutist, I'm not arguing that we should completely eliminate tariffs, or implement them against everything. In the real world, the best answer is almost always somewhere in between.

Here, we're specifically discussing the 1200 mile range of the new BYD battery just put out for field trials. While tesla did build an EV company mostly with onshore production, this was via a practice that is regularly being called a foul in criticism of the Chinese EV development model: government subsidies. Tesla received massive subsidies from the US federal government, and the California state government to establish it's factory in the east bay.

But this factory was to build cars, not new battery tech. This innovation aspect is seriously lacking in the US. With the current administration eliminating funding on much of the research that was in progress.

This industry resistance is primarily centered around protecting the revenue from what's ever more frequently being called "legacy tech", the petro industry. There are a lot of useful applications for petroleum, we don't need to burn it 8-/ It's not like they'll stop drilling because we use it for other products.

But instead of innovation, we're seeing "corporations are people" and "our bribery is our free speech" arguments propping up a resistance to disruptive, but broadly beneficial new technology.

This gets to my general point, which you mention in the Harvard Business School mentality: there is a sort of meme, "Capitalists hate capitalism". Without correct regulation, every major industry will seek to be a rent taking monopoly. Why wouldn't they. They get more this way.

But this isn't the promise of the benefits of the magical market forces. This is why I call it a lie. Telsa got government subsidies to build an EV, in the US, but this still didn't really do anything to push the US ahead in overcoming the shortcomings of EVs (namely the cost and capacity of batteries).

There are efforts trying catch up now, but as mentioned, a lot of that is now threatened.

So why shouldn't we, at least in the near term, accept the Chinese government's generous subsidies, and import their products now at low prices?

We don't have to stop our own R and D because of this, but in business logic, apparently that's the consequence. Again, capitalism (as it's currently running wild in the US) fails to solve the problem.

I was amazed at how many ongoing comments this article continues to get on HN. One thing that distressing, is how many center on the argument that "most Americans don't care about climate change".

This comes to my last point: most Americans have become lost in their "culture war identities". Remote rural residents could be some of the biggest beneficiaries of broad electrification. The propaganda of what I call, the "petro mafia", focuses on aligning with a demographic identity. This is why I say the wing-nuts and the woke-nuts are two sides of the same coin. Putting their identity group membership ahead of rational analysis of each individual issue.

Environmental destruction by the ongoing industrial revolution is producing real and mounting consequences. Anyone thinking this a some libtard deep-state brain-implant population control, has just lost their shit completely. Sadly, this is a lot of the current US population. Obviously the c-suite at major petro mafia corps know this is real, and catastrophic. They just know they'll die before the worst of the consequences come to bear, and they don't give a shit about future generations.

I digress, and the topic spirals out indefinitely. Thanks again for engaging conversation.