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  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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

55 comments