The Democrats have a pathological inability to frame anything in terms of simple self interest and national pride. They always have to come up with some grandiose moral argument that just makes anyone not already drinking the cool aid gag on the sanctimony.
It's such an easy sell. Why are we electrifying? Because we're going to lead the world in new technology, and we're gonna make a fortune off selling it to the rest of the world! What about the people who work in the oil industry, they're gonna be hurt by this? Nope! They'll be fine. Now that we aren't using the oil at home, we're gonna drill as much as we can and make a fortune exporting that to other countries too. Make America great a̶g̶a̶i̶n̶!
And yet Democrats can't close the deal because their messaging strategy seems to be "how can we make our point in a way that maximizes the number of people that hates us"
"On August 16, 2022, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law, marking the most significant action Congress has taken on clean energy and climate change in the nation’s history. With the stroke of his pen, the President redefined American leadership in confronting the existential threat of the climate crisis and set forth a new era of American innovation and ingenuity to lower consumer costs and drive the global clean energy economy forward."
No. this issue is not the Dems weakness in Framing. And a pivot away from fossil fuels *is* rightly seen by Big Oils as competition. The issue is a GOP politically addicted to the technologies of the past.
The GOP is utterly beholden to a key constituency: Fossil Fuels. The GOP owes its relevance and its survival, to serving Big Oil and Evangelicals. If you think I'm wrong, just watch a few hours of FOX News, the official spokesnetwork of the GOP, to sample the conservative zeitgeist on renewables vs. internal combustion. Elon's recent big splash in GOP circles will undoubtedly start to change this; but it may be too little, too late for America.
That's absurd. Have you ever read or listened to a Biden speech? It's nothing but self interest and national pride. If you think acting morally is incompatible with pursuing self-interest it's because you are not thinking hard enough.
What's wrong with having pride in your own country? As Americans we may be getting arse-whooped by China because of a GOP beholden to obsolescent technologies, but we're still in the game.
No doubt you are right that we face peril in our questionable commitment to these technologies.
And I am sure that the association with hippies and tree huggers contributes significantly to conservative opposition.
But I am pretty sure there's more to the opposition than that.
One huge theme of opposition involves resistance to massive change. Most human beings don't like change, especially change that is forced upon them. And technological advances ALWAYS cause change; revolutionary advances bring about radical change. In the internet era, this is not as vaguely understood as in the past; or, to be more precise, activists with agendas are better able to leverage resistance to change for their own purposes.
When you step away from liberal boiler plate and look at what motivates everyday conservatives, it's the pileup of changes that have occurred during their lives, some very direct (the Pill and its impact on society) and some not-so-direct (electronic media that results in cosmopolitan and rural culture so visible to each other, motivating each to insist on reforming the other... while cosmopolitan culture is tempting rural youth). Meanwhile, good roads allowed the malls to wipe out small town businesses, and then internet businesses to finish the job.
The bottom line is that we face a very difficult dilemma. How to convince a democratic society to choose a massive wave of new technological change.
Yes, framing it as environmentalism hurt. But I wonder whether it would be working regardless. Not without very strong leadership, and I am skeptical that the American public would choose that leadership.
Technology, while bringing all kinds of benefits, also brings changes that disadvantage people. Waves or rapid change bring changes that disadvantage lots of people -- maybe more than 50% of them.
Thus, for a would-be national leader to campaign on a message of "We need a whole lot more technological advances" is a hard sell.
Especially with the internet making it far easier for people who have a vested interest in opposing change (oil companies come to mind, by there are many others) to portray those technological advances as threatening.
It really doesn't matter which past technologies were encouraged or ignored by government -- it's the sum total of the rapid change that is causing resistance.
1) Technological change has become ever more rapid, such that an individual experiences far more change during a lifetime -- and that is mainly what counts. You can see the impact everywhere, from trying to conduct secure financial transactions to exercising intelligent oversight to the influences on your kids' lives.
2) SOME Americans cheered, but many were not. However, by and large, those people could be ignored because they did not have sufficient numbers, nor an effective voice. And, to the extent we noticed, we saw such people as the voice of darkness, the Scopes Trial types, the so-obviously-wrong that we sneered and then looked away. It's just that now their numbers are up, and modern communications have given them a bullhorn. And they win elections.
Americans rushed off to buy the new technologies more than any people in human history, and they still do. You are just projecting your own beliefs onto the American people.
As for the latest elections, there is no evidence that Trump and the Republicans won because people are against the rate of technological innovation. They clearly want economic growth and they understand that technological innovation is a key cause of that economic growth.
The reason why people like Musk and Vivek joined Trump is because they perceived him as pro-innovation. And those guys may be wrong, but they are not stupid.
Well, you are wrong on one fact. I am not projecting my views! I might mutter in old age about this or that being changed -- but I always remember that I would have been dead at least twice, in childhood and in middle age, without technologies recently discovered.
I am not anti-technology or anti-change.
But I am baffled by mass blindness in blue America to the extent of anger about change. Maybe it's that people live in information bubbles, maybe it's an assumption that rationality rules peoples' lives, just because it ought to. (The same people who buy their kids the means to access social media can be the most furious at the impact of social media; the same people who most resent the effect of malls on small town America were often among the first to do their holiday shopping at malls. Go figure.)
Maybe I am more aware of this, having lived my adult life in a very red county -- and getting along well enough with people to hear what they are about.
I readily admit, I have no idea how much this impacted the last election. Trump's celebrity status makes policy analysis difficult. But I would also not assume that just because Trump has Musk onboard means that people who resent change did not think Trump is on their side. The politics of resentment are very good for bypassing logic.
I really don't think people are angry about change and technological innovation. I think they are pissed off about their political opponents. That is a very different issue.
This really let's a lot of Republicans off the hook.
There's this idea that only Democrats have agency.
If Republicans do something evil or stupid, then that's the fault of Democrats for talking about it wrong. (Not the Republicans who decided to do something evil/stupid)
It would be good for Democrats to talk more about batteries and solar as a prosperity/national security issue.... But come next month, they are not in power.
How do we empower the few clean energy Republicans to stop the US from hippie punching ourselves to technological obsolescence?
Fault doesn't matter. Actions have consequences, and if you want to get the desired outcome you need to take action in the correct way to get it. There are plenty of true things you can say that will get you punched in the face. And you can complain all day that you were morally correct, but that doesn't unpunch your face.
x1000. The Yglesian self-flagellation plus anti-climate advocacy is ultimately a dead end. The current GOP (which is not "conservative" in the classic sense) get all its power by defining any attempt at positive change as bad and re-defining our current bad habits as good and safe and familiar. "Meat tastes good", "Internal combustion engines make cool noises" and "Real men refine oil, not lithium" are oafish, cretinous punch-lines that somehow substitute for policy thinking in the Republican worldview. Democrats did not lose power because of pro-EV, battery and electrification policies (which WERE framed as industrial policies for anybody who actually considered the policies). Democrats lost power because the marginal voter is massively ignorant, would not know an EV battery from a AAA, but was just pissed off enough about inflation, immigration and everyday crime to swallow the Republican lies this time around. Anybody who thinks we are going to get Republican (as opposed to Independent) voters to join in anything that ultimately undermines the oil and gas industries is deluded. Those industries won't stand for it.
I think that framing this as an issue of partisan advantage is a dead-end for good governance, and while it may be tempting to hope that the incoming administration self-destructs, if you're playing the long game for national interest that would be a bad outcome. The Republicans aren't on the hook: they won. And, in large part, the only way the sanest among them have agency is by leaving their party and being replaced by True Believers.
There are innumerable unpredictable factors that will influence future political direction over the next two/four years. Risking major harm by following a political agenda based on guesswork about what will yield partisan advantages doesn't seem like a good idea. Better to adopt the tactic of advocating for good policies as effectively as possible and look for opportunities in the mistakes the new leadership makes and random developments that capture public attention.
I think it would be better to embrace the idea that only Democrats have effective agency when it comes to advocating for the national interest right now and to become resigned to figuring out how to use that agency to greatest effect.
The National interest, sure, that’s the ticket! 😂Thanks for researching it and determining that race-based grants to campaign donors and paying rich people to buy EVs or put solar on their roof (into markets where the marginal value of that power is negative) were the pressing national interests of our time. What would we do without you looking out for us?
How do you win a war with drones? Five years ago it was killer satellites. Then hypersonics. Then nuclear satellites. Now drones. Drones are asymmetric until they are not. China for the most part has short range drones that can drop small munitions. Not much different than JDAM and SDB. Except US has platforms to drop 1000s of JDAMs daily anywhere in world for years with impunity. US has been fighting with these systems at scale since 1995. China could use them in a surprise attack. But then what? Explain how you win a war with a first strike weapon? It did not work for Japan or Bin Laden.
You would need to forward deploy in containers probably near our airbase. Undetected. Probably 5k containers. And train each to autonomously mission plan. Take out our fleets all day one. Because once the approach was detected, there would be no chance to redeploy next wave. And we would then respond.
Yeah, if you can manufacture all those JDAMs, and we have proven that we can't even manufacture enough artillery shells for Ukraine. Take out our fleets and then we would do what? China can manufacture ships faster than us. So by the time we responded we would be outnumbered and it would only get worse as the war continued. You can't win a war with a first strike, but that's not how China is going to win.
And the US response would likely be a massive attack on the Chinese mainland with B-2 bombers (and/or B-21 bombers, depending on when the war breaks out) that would largely nullify China's peacetime manufacturing advantage.
I would add, the differentiator is mission system, flight control, and comms. No one can replicate starlink and starlink is very difficult to take down. We have more terminal event imagery than any military. In a sense just like Tesla has a real word database so does NGA. Better than any. And we have been thinking about this longer - look up brilliant pebbles.
Would electric motors, batteries and solar power be on anyone's list of anything if not for the climate-concerned innovators and early-adopters of solar panels and EV's? Progressive, selfless types invent the world which aggressive, selfish types then inherit. Seems unfair but so it goes.
Actually it was the 1970s oil crisis- ie price signals- that put them on the agenda, plus natural tech advancement in semiconductors and batteries (cellphones) fed by consumer demand.
It's consumer demand that I'm talking about. The real increase in energy density of batteries has occurred in the last 10 years driven by early adopter take-up of EVs. I'm not saying progressives built climate change or even invented solutions to it (the innovators I was referring to are the first stage of adopters in the technology adoption curve before early adopters). I'm saying they were the first to respond to it in a rational way by changing their consumer behaviour.
What are you talking about? EV sales have continued to increase, apart from one quarter where it fell back to the levels seen a year earlier before recovering to new highs in more recent quarters.
Now you’re just admitting you lied when you said demand was dropping. And I’m fairly sure that electric vehicle market share is over 9% - it was 8.9% if you only count pure batter vehicles in Q3 2024, so it’s very likely over that right now, and quite a bit over that if you’re willing to consider plug in hybrids that almost never get gas.
If ICE vehicles are so great, they wouldn’t need you to lie about how their competition is both falling in demand and has low demand.
So maybe that's why Musk has been allying himself to Trump. They say that Musk's superpower is getting what he wants out of people and he really will want those BEV subsidies to remain in place, won't he.
They may be small in number, but innovator and early adopter consumers are the umbilical cords and incubators of new technologies. Without them, industrial corporations couldn't get new technologies off the ground - between the R&D lab and the corporate profit is the open-minded, future-focused consumer.
Assembling an EV is not difficult. Less complicated than ICE. And the Japanese have the technology in batteries- Toshiba is a leader (though not in cost). Japan’s car companies have made a strategic choice and so far a correct one for the US market. More densely populated, urban areas (China, Japan) will be great markets for EVs even without subsidies, in time, however.
However, our current battery materials are disappearing resources (like petrol). Hydrogen is going to around forever.
Key challenges are to make batteries more efficient and to make them from more sustainable and readily available materials. Toyota has been sceptical of current battery tech and has invested in solid state batteries instead
I would love to see the US stop paying rich people to buy EVs assembled with Chinese battery components and instead start investing in materials science and battery (and nuclear) research on a large scale. The problem is that policy is set by activists who have fixed dreams about the future (all EV by 2035!) completely disconnected from cost benefit and unions who are happy to be subsidized to assemble Chinese parts. When it comes to building batteries, the ones we should be concerned most about are the smaller ones for drones and military applications and larger ones for grid storage (as well as pursuing non-battery grid storage solutions. Given how AI demand has driven electricity demand, does anyone think that using more electricity to charge EVs (when we have a perfectly acceptable petrol-based auto transport system) or switching heating from nat gas to electric is really a top priority? The priority is to better integrate renewables into the grid (broaden the grid) and find grid storage solutions that captures surplus renewables output so that we don’t need to keep coal plants running to power some kid’s chat bot.
Of course, those are my personal opinions, based upon my own largely uninformed priorities!
“ However, our current battery materials are disappearing resources (like petrol).”
A Tesla has exactly as many atoms of rare earths the day it’s manufactured as it does years later when it’s recycled. What on Earth are you talking about?
Thank you -- what an absurd comment that was! Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data recently made the point that ongoing advances in recycling these materials plus ongoing advances in the efficient use of the recycled materials means that today's products will result in more than 1:1 replacements in the future. They are not "disappearing" - they are multiplying...
No one can blame China for putting a state directive on moving towards electrification. It is a resource poor country when it comes to petroleum, thus a national security problem. The little petroleum that they do get is devoted to its war machines. The public will need to make do with electric vehicles. Having said that, the reason why legacy automakers are losing is not because of technology, it is because of price. Chinese EV’s (and Teslas) are built using automated mass production using far fewer parts and far less labor. This is where they are winning in the developing countries over the Japanese and Korean automakers. This is the death of the labor union. If big labor doesn’t adapt, the companies which employ them will cease to exist in 2 to 3 years.
Developing countries are going to need a lot more power over the coming decades, and I doubt using that for EVs will end up being the top priority, personally. Lighting, air con, internet will come first.
Richer, densely populated EMs without their own oil industry (like Bangladesh) could be good markets for EVs but they are having trouble keeping the lights on as is.
Great piece. In addition to the framing issue I see another problem: moving to electrification is such a momentous change that you cant leave it to just the market. Take for example the move from combustion engines to EVs: In Europe its slow not just because of the car builders (they started as usual with targeting the early adopters with high prices slowing the adoption rate) but as important is the electrical infrastructure (the grid and charging stations). And this is far from ready for mass adoption and governments leave this mainly to the market to sort out. As a result of all this consumers are waiting and who can blame them: EVs are expensive and charging is not always easy and confusing (different companies with different charging stations with non transparent pricing structures etc.). Its all just too slow, confusing and complicated. Here China with its state command capitalism has an advantage!
No, what is your point? None of these things happened in a free market vacuum. As cars were developed and became more popular the government paid for the road network for them to use. Where it didn’t make economic sense to provide electricity (rural areas) the government paid for rural electrification.
CRISPR is a good start. A mere 48 hours after China gave the Covid-19 genome to the U.S., Biogen had built the successful vaccine. The lag time to distribution came because of Phase 1, 2, and 3 trials running concurrently. China has yet to produce an effective vaccine. Vaccine R&D and manufacturing is also a low-margin, unattractive business to Big Pharma, until it isn’t. The political will (Operation Warp Speed) and funding $250 million was the key ingredient.
Solar power will do fine in the U.S. The two political extremes of California and Texas lead the country in deployment of AltGreen Energy. Let’s throw in Iowa (wind energy) to mitigate those demographic arguments about density of population, etc. Again, the missing ingredient is political will. Take 30 million of the 60 million U.S. acres dedicated to corn ethanol and cover them with solar panel arrays. This would provide 2.75X the electricity needs of the U.S. Crops other than corn (eliminate corn syrup for high-processed foods to reduce health care costs) could be grown beneath the solar panels (e.g. soybeans for the Asia-Pacific market). Solar panels have 20% more productivity above greenery. In some cases, crop yields increase. Evapotranspiration of fresh-water irrigation would be a tremendous savings of this important resource and lower irrigation costs. If farmers receive revenue for producing electricity in addition to revenue from more-efficiently/cost-effective raised crops, you won’t need to twist arms. Farming is a business.
Batteries. I think five years out or sooner, the U.S. will be producing at scale batteries with more energy density and safer (technologies that mitigate thermal runway). Silicon anodes and solid state batteries will likely come from U.S. companies.
Electric motors: Who knows?
AI may be able to do work that would otherwise be done with quantum computers. Purpose-built transformer chips (SoHo) can run 20x the processing speed of GPUs. And use less energy, which is critical in re the exponential need for more electricity to run new data centers (annual rate of data centers built out in the U.S. is 40).
I think one of the reasons BYD is so competitive is that unlike Tesla’s, it concentrated its efforts on building a great EV, while not obsessing over autonomous driving systems. I don’t think most EV buyers and/or potential EV buyers give a rat’s ass about autonomous driving systems. They want an EV at a decent price, and consumers will be predisposed to purchasing EVs when charging-station infrastructure is more reliable and adequately distributed throughout the U.S.
It’s amazing what political will can accomplish. For example, the Manhattan Project would cost $250 billion in today’s dollars. It required sourcing tons of various materials that were in short supply because of WWII. The best scientists, business minds, cranks, eccentrics, conservative wing nuts, and pin-headed academics worked together because they had common cause: national security. What’s needed are better political leadership that can inspire bipartisanship. Covid-19 showed the world the U.S. isn’t that politically divided. We can’t afford to argue the politics of Covid-19 because we created the best vaccine and steered the economy through and past it with the various branches of the government working with common cause.
As Warren Buffett has repeatedly said: “Betting against the U.S. is a bad bet.” He’s lived much longer and experienced more than most. FYI: Charlie Nubger was the first major U.S. investor to discover and visit BYD in China. BRK.A followed with a large investment.
As for the future of space, here’s a list of the top three rocket launchers, all working on supersonic space transport:
You may well be right (your knowledge of energy storage vastly exceeds mine), but on its face, a fuel cell seems like the best battery ever created: electrolyze water (using solar power); store hydrogen; use to create power when needed. No rare earth elements. No combustion. Light. Portable. Cheap to build. A little Li on the cathode makes the cell last years longer. For automobiles and especially for grid storage it seems ideal.
One problem is that converting electricity to hydrogen, and then back to electricity via a fuel cell is much less efficient than charging and discharging a battery.
Hydrogen tanks also seem to take up more space than batteries.
The second point doesn't compute. At about 15,000 BTUs/lb, even propane is more energy dense than a fully charged EV battery. H2 is about 3 times as energy dense as propane (https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/properties). Whether by weight or volume, a combustion gas like propane or H2 is always going to come out on top. That's why electric airplanes aren't a thing.
As far as I can tell, the tanks are lighter than batteries, but I think the problem is that one lb of hydrogen takes up too much space. It is really difficult to store hydrogen.
It is easy to observe that battery cars are winning big time over hydrogen cars, even though both of these got a lot of research. Any images of hydrogen cars show all of the cargo space taken up by HUGE hydrogen tanks.
If you're willing to sacrifice some energy efficiency to do it, you can turn hydrogen and carbon dioxide into methane and then burn that in your car instead. It's got a higher energy density and the US already has a lot of infrastructure designed to transport methane everywhere.
It has also a lot of infrastructure to transport electricity.
I agree there is room for this though, airplanes spring to mind, but for cars the downside of an extra 1000lb of weight seems manageable. In return you don't have to deal with the PITA that is storing hydrogen, and you get much more miles out of 1kWh of electricity.
I was reading that the Chinese can now basically sell an EV for $10k less than an equivalent ICE vehicle. One of many factors is that Japanese, American and European manufactures have something like 48-60 month development cycles vs 18 months in China. The issue seems to be ICE vehicles are just so vastly more complex to manufacture it requires extensive testing and development to prevent brand killing recalls. An EV is so much simpler it doesn’t require that level of testing and refinement. But legacy manufactures are very reluctant to change how things are done.
Perhaps (irrespective of country) it's just easier for all-new companies like BYD and Tesla to get good at making and selling EVs, than companies that have tons of ICE baggage?
Exactly and they don’t have a population with generations of automobile ownership experience. Essentially no one in China had a car before the late 1990s.
It is not at all clear that those cheap EVs can be produced without massive government subsidies. We have seen this many times with China: massive subsidies lead to massive over-production and then massive debt.
The talk of drones being the future of warfare is confusing to me because I’m never clear on exactly how people are defining drones. It seems people are usually talking about small quadcopters?
The US has obviously been using drones like Predators for decades. Especially after 9/11. Do those not count? Why are quadcopters so special?
I have to point out that Musk is self-evidently a complete moron in his drone posts, and I think you're getting way ahead of yourself too. Drones aren't going to replace manned fighters/bombers until we hit an AI point where they can actually be made completely autonomous (which is rather further out than you think, in my view). Prior to that they're going to be limited to uses like what's happening in Ukraine now and loyal wingman stuff like the US and China are working on. The fundamental reason for this is that if they're not autonomous, they're jammable, which is a pretty massive vulnerability to intentionally build into your entire air force.
A jammer is also a target that screams out HERE I AM on lots of radio frequencies. A self-guided "blow up the jammer" weapon that's much cheaper than a cruise missile should be possible to make...
I'm hoping Trump and Republicans don't completely screw us, I have some hope because Musk is now in their camp, but we'll see what wins out: economics or culture.
Yes ten years ago when my son started working in the 'low altitude economy' as it was not called then, as a mechanical engineer working on drones, he felt pressure from the tech world to pivot to software. Hardware was for China; thoughtware for the US, he kept hearing. I'm glad he's stayed with drone engineering and manufacturing.
The Democrats have a pathological inability to frame anything in terms of simple self interest and national pride. They always have to come up with some grandiose moral argument that just makes anyone not already drinking the cool aid gag on the sanctimony.
It's such an easy sell. Why are we electrifying? Because we're going to lead the world in new technology, and we're gonna make a fortune off selling it to the rest of the world! What about the people who work in the oil industry, they're gonna be hurt by this? Nope! They'll be fine. Now that we aren't using the oil at home, we're gonna drill as much as we can and make a fortune exporting that to other countries too. Make America great a̶g̶a̶i̶n̶!
And yet Democrats can't close the deal because their messaging strategy seems to be "how can we make our point in a way that maximizes the number of people that hates us"
I think this is overstated - one (large) example - the relevant bills are called "Inflation Reduction Act" and "Chips and Science act.
Here's the Biden pitch for the IRA:
"On August 16, 2022, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law, marking the most significant action Congress has taken on clean energy and climate change in the nation’s history. With the stroke of his pen, the President redefined American leadership in confronting the existential threat of the climate crisis and set forth a new era of American innovation and ingenuity to lower consumer costs and drive the global clean energy economy forward."
https://www.whitehouse.gov/cleanenergy/inflation-reduction-act-guidebook/
(Also kind of hilarious that they don't even try to pretend that the "Inflation Reduction Act" will reduce inflation)
No. this issue is not the Dems weakness in Framing. And a pivot away from fossil fuels *is* rightly seen by Big Oils as competition. The issue is a GOP politically addicted to the technologies of the past.
The GOP is utterly beholden to a key constituency: Fossil Fuels. The GOP owes its relevance and its survival, to serving Big Oil and Evangelicals. If you think I'm wrong, just watch a few hours of FOX News, the official spokesnetwork of the GOP, to sample the conservative zeitgeist on renewables vs. internal combustion. Elon's recent big splash in GOP circles will undoubtedly start to change this; but it may be too little, too late for America.
That's absurd. Have you ever read or listened to a Biden speech? It's nothing but self interest and national pride. If you think acting morally is incompatible with pursuing self-interest it's because you are not thinking hard enough.
What's wrong with having pride in your own country? As Americans we may be getting arse-whooped by China because of a GOP beholden to obsolescent technologies, but we're still in the game.
Totally agree - I think Biden is/was messaging this all the time.
Blaming Democrat messaging for Republican obstinate near-sightedness, and less PC stupidity, is quite something.
Good comment!
No doubt you are right that we face peril in our questionable commitment to these technologies.
And I am sure that the association with hippies and tree huggers contributes significantly to conservative opposition.
But I am pretty sure there's more to the opposition than that.
One huge theme of opposition involves resistance to massive change. Most human beings don't like change, especially change that is forced upon them. And technological advances ALWAYS cause change; revolutionary advances bring about radical change. In the internet era, this is not as vaguely understood as in the past; or, to be more precise, activists with agendas are better able to leverage resistance to change for their own purposes.
When you step away from liberal boiler plate and look at what motivates everyday conservatives, it's the pileup of changes that have occurred during their lives, some very direct (the Pill and its impact on society) and some not-so-direct (electronic media that results in cosmopolitan and rural culture so visible to each other, motivating each to insist on reforming the other... while cosmopolitan culture is tempting rural youth). Meanwhile, good roads allowed the malls to wipe out small town businesses, and then internet businesses to finish the job.
The bottom line is that we face a very difficult dilemma. How to convince a democratic society to choose a massive wave of new technological change.
Yes, framing it as environmentalism hurt. But I wonder whether it would be working regardless. Not without very strong leadership, and I am skeptical that the American public would choose that leadership.
Very depressing.
Technological change usually isn’t successfully imposed via decrees by elected officials looking to pay off donors.
I am still trying to build that steel furnace the Chairman told me to put in my back yard.
I may not have been clear.
Technology, while bringing all kinds of benefits, also brings changes that disadvantage people. Waves or rapid change bring changes that disadvantage lots of people -- maybe more than 50% of them.
Thus, for a would-be national leader to campaign on a message of "We need a whole lot more technological advances" is a hard sell.
Especially with the internet making it far easier for people who have a vested interest in opposing change (oil companies come to mind, by there are many others) to portray those technological advances as threatening.
It really doesn't matter which past technologies were encouraged or ignored by government -- it's the sum total of the rapid change that is causing resistance.
American history has been full of massive change for centuries, and the American people have cheered.
1) Technological change has become ever more rapid, such that an individual experiences far more change during a lifetime -- and that is mainly what counts. You can see the impact everywhere, from trying to conduct secure financial transactions to exercising intelligent oversight to the influences on your kids' lives.
2) SOME Americans cheered, but many were not. However, by and large, those people could be ignored because they did not have sufficient numbers, nor an effective voice. And, to the extent we noticed, we saw such people as the voice of darkness, the Scopes Trial types, the so-obviously-wrong that we sneered and then looked away. It's just that now their numbers are up, and modern communications have given them a bullhorn. And they win elections.
“ those people could be ignored”
LOL
Americans rushed off to buy the new technologies more than any people in human history, and they still do. You are just projecting your own beliefs onto the American people.
As for the latest elections, there is no evidence that Trump and the Republicans won because people are against the rate of technological innovation. They clearly want economic growth and they understand that technological innovation is a key cause of that economic growth.
The reason why people like Musk and Vivek joined Trump is because they perceived him as pro-innovation. And those guys may be wrong, but they are not stupid.
Well, you are wrong on one fact. I am not projecting my views! I might mutter in old age about this or that being changed -- but I always remember that I would have been dead at least twice, in childhood and in middle age, without technologies recently discovered.
I am not anti-technology or anti-change.
But I am baffled by mass blindness in blue America to the extent of anger about change. Maybe it's that people live in information bubbles, maybe it's an assumption that rationality rules peoples' lives, just because it ought to. (The same people who buy their kids the means to access social media can be the most furious at the impact of social media; the same people who most resent the effect of malls on small town America were often among the first to do their holiday shopping at malls. Go figure.)
Maybe I am more aware of this, having lived my adult life in a very red county -- and getting along well enough with people to hear what they are about.
I readily admit, I have no idea how much this impacted the last election. Trump's celebrity status makes policy analysis difficult. But I would also not assume that just because Trump has Musk onboard means that people who resent change did not think Trump is on their side. The politics of resentment are very good for bypassing logic.
I really don't think people are angry about change and technological innovation. I think they are pissed off about their political opponents. That is a very different issue.
And I live in a red state.
This really let's a lot of Republicans off the hook.
There's this idea that only Democrats have agency.
If Republicans do something evil or stupid, then that's the fault of Democrats for talking about it wrong. (Not the Republicans who decided to do something evil/stupid)
It would be good for Democrats to talk more about batteries and solar as a prosperity/national security issue.... But come next month, they are not in power.
How do we empower the few clean energy Republicans to stop the US from hippie punching ourselves to technological obsolescence?
Fault doesn't matter. Actions have consequences, and if you want to get the desired outcome you need to take action in the correct way to get it. There are plenty of true things you can say that will get you punched in the face. And you can complain all day that you were morally correct, but that doesn't unpunch your face.
x1000. The Yglesian self-flagellation plus anti-climate advocacy is ultimately a dead end. The current GOP (which is not "conservative" in the classic sense) get all its power by defining any attempt at positive change as bad and re-defining our current bad habits as good and safe and familiar. "Meat tastes good", "Internal combustion engines make cool noises" and "Real men refine oil, not lithium" are oafish, cretinous punch-lines that somehow substitute for policy thinking in the Republican worldview. Democrats did not lose power because of pro-EV, battery and electrification policies (which WERE framed as industrial policies for anybody who actually considered the policies). Democrats lost power because the marginal voter is massively ignorant, would not know an EV battery from a AAA, but was just pissed off enough about inflation, immigration and everyday crime to swallow the Republican lies this time around. Anybody who thinks we are going to get Republican (as opposed to Independent) voters to join in anything that ultimately undermines the oil and gas industries is deluded. Those industries won't stand for it.
Because Democrats are the ones selling these policies to Republicans.
If they're selling it wrong, it's easier to adjust their pitch than to ask Republicans to rethink their policy goals.
If you persist in making your side stupid, they won't be intelligent when needed. And you never know when you don't want them stupid.
I think that framing this as an issue of partisan advantage is a dead-end for good governance, and while it may be tempting to hope that the incoming administration self-destructs, if you're playing the long game for national interest that would be a bad outcome. The Republicans aren't on the hook: they won. And, in large part, the only way the sanest among them have agency is by leaving their party and being replaced by True Believers.
There are innumerable unpredictable factors that will influence future political direction over the next two/four years. Risking major harm by following a political agenda based on guesswork about what will yield partisan advantages doesn't seem like a good idea. Better to adopt the tactic of advocating for good policies as effectively as possible and look for opportunities in the mistakes the new leadership makes and random developments that capture public attention.
I think it would be better to embrace the idea that only Democrats have effective agency when it comes to advocating for the national interest right now and to become resigned to figuring out how to use that agency to greatest effect.
The National interest, sure, that’s the ticket! 😂Thanks for researching it and determining that race-based grants to campaign donors and paying rich people to buy EVs or put solar on their roof (into markets where the marginal value of that power is negative) were the pressing national interests of our time. What would we do without you looking out for us?
Yeah, it would have been so great if US EV demand was only 1/16 of China's rather than a third. Our industry would be so much further ahead! /s
I always admire people who know how to use emojis. They are the future of America.
How do you win a war with drones? Five years ago it was killer satellites. Then hypersonics. Then nuclear satellites. Now drones. Drones are asymmetric until they are not. China for the most part has short range drones that can drop small munitions. Not much different than JDAM and SDB. Except US has platforms to drop 1000s of JDAMs daily anywhere in world for years with impunity. US has been fighting with these systems at scale since 1995. China could use them in a surprise attack. But then what? Explain how you win a war with a first strike weapon? It did not work for Japan or Bin Laden.
You would need to forward deploy in containers probably near our airbase. Undetected. Probably 5k containers. And train each to autonomously mission plan. Take out our fleets all day one. Because once the approach was detected, there would be no chance to redeploy next wave. And we would then respond.
Yeah, if you can manufacture all those JDAMs, and we have proven that we can't even manufacture enough artillery shells for Ukraine. Take out our fleets and then we would do what? China can manufacture ships faster than us. So by the time we responded we would be outnumbered and it would only get worse as the war continued. You can't win a war with a first strike, but that's not how China is going to win.
Great points that I wish Noah would engage with.
I think we need a guest post from an expert. Austin Vernon comes to mind for the engineering angle. Noah, that would be a great guest to have!
And the US response would likely be a massive attack on the Chinese mainland with B-2 bombers (and/or B-21 bombers, depending on when the war breaks out) that would largely nullify China's peacetime manufacturing advantage.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_H-20
China’s stealth bomber.
I would add, the differentiator is mission system, flight control, and comms. No one can replicate starlink and starlink is very difficult to take down. We have more terminal event imagery than any military. In a sense just like Tesla has a real word database so does NGA. Better than any. And we have been thinking about this longer - look up brilliant pebbles.
Would electric motors, batteries and solar power be on anyone's list of anything if not for the climate-concerned innovators and early-adopters of solar panels and EV's? Progressive, selfless types invent the world which aggressive, selfish types then inherit. Seems unfair but so it goes.
Actually it was the 1970s oil crisis- ie price signals- that put them on the agenda, plus natural tech advancement in semiconductors and batteries (cellphones) fed by consumer demand.
You didn’t build that
It's consumer demand that I'm talking about. The real increase in energy density of batteries has occurred in the last 10 years driven by early adopter take-up of EVs. I'm not saying progressives built climate change or even invented solutions to it (the innovators I was referring to are the first stage of adopters in the technology adoption curve before early adopters). I'm saying they were the first to respond to it in a rational way by changing their consumer behaviour.
What are you talking about? EV sales have continued to increase, apart from one quarter where it fell back to the levels seen a year earlier before recovering to new highs in more recent quarters.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1231872/battery-electric-vehicle-sales-in-the-united-states/
Now you’re just admitting you lied when you said demand was dropping. And I’m fairly sure that electric vehicle market share is over 9% - it was 8.9% if you only count pure batter vehicles in Q3 2024, so it’s very likely over that right now, and quite a bit over that if you’re willing to consider plug in hybrids that almost never get gas.
If ICE vehicles are so great, they wouldn’t need you to lie about how their competition is both falling in demand and has low demand.
So maybe that's why Musk has been allying himself to Trump. They say that Musk's superpower is getting what he wants out of people and he really will want those BEV subsidies to remain in place, won't he.
They may be small in number, but innovator and early adopter consumers are the umbilical cords and incubators of new technologies. Without them, industrial corporations couldn't get new technologies off the ground - between the R&D lab and the corporate profit is the open-minded, future-focused consumer.
Assembling an EV is not difficult. Less complicated than ICE. And the Japanese have the technology in batteries- Toshiba is a leader (though not in cost). Japan’s car companies have made a strategic choice and so far a correct one for the US market. More densely populated, urban areas (China, Japan) will be great markets for EVs even without subsidies, in time, however.
However, our current battery materials are disappearing resources (like petrol). Hydrogen is going to around forever.
Key challenges are to make batteries more efficient and to make them from more sustainable and readily available materials. Toyota has been sceptical of current battery tech and has invested in solid state batteries instead
https://electrek.co/2024/09/09/toyotas-all-solid-state-ev-battery-plans-get-green-light-japan/
I would love to see the US stop paying rich people to buy EVs assembled with Chinese battery components and instead start investing in materials science and battery (and nuclear) research on a large scale. The problem is that policy is set by activists who have fixed dreams about the future (all EV by 2035!) completely disconnected from cost benefit and unions who are happy to be subsidized to assemble Chinese parts. When it comes to building batteries, the ones we should be concerned most about are the smaller ones for drones and military applications and larger ones for grid storage (as well as pursuing non-battery grid storage solutions. Given how AI demand has driven electricity demand, does anyone think that using more electricity to charge EVs (when we have a perfectly acceptable petrol-based auto transport system) or switching heating from nat gas to electric is really a top priority? The priority is to better integrate renewables into the grid (broaden the grid) and find grid storage solutions that captures surplus renewables output so that we don’t need to keep coal plants running to power some kid’s chat bot.
Of course, those are my personal opinions, based upon my own largely uninformed priorities!
“ However, our current battery materials are disappearing resources (like petrol).”
A Tesla has exactly as many atoms of rare earths the day it’s manufactured as it does years later when it’s recycled. What on Earth are you talking about?
Thank you -- what an absurd comment that was! Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data recently made the point that ongoing advances in recycling these materials plus ongoing advances in the efficient use of the recycled materials means that today's products will result in more than 1:1 replacements in the future. They are not "disappearing" - they are multiplying...
No one can blame China for putting a state directive on moving towards electrification. It is a resource poor country when it comes to petroleum, thus a national security problem. The little petroleum that they do get is devoted to its war machines. The public will need to make do with electric vehicles. Having said that, the reason why legacy automakers are losing is not because of technology, it is because of price. Chinese EV’s (and Teslas) are built using automated mass production using far fewer parts and far less labor. This is where they are winning in the developing countries over the Japanese and Korean automakers. This is the death of the labor union. If big labor doesn’t adapt, the companies which employ them will cease to exist in 2 to 3 years.
Developing countries are going to need a lot more power over the coming decades, and I doubt using that for EVs will end up being the top priority, personally. Lighting, air con, internet will come first.
Richer, densely populated EMs without their own oil industry (like Bangladesh) could be good markets for EVs but they are having trouble keeping the lights on as is.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/bangladeshs-worst-electricity-crisis-decade-2023-06-07/
There was another large blackout a week ago
Great piece. In addition to the framing issue I see another problem: moving to electrification is such a momentous change that you cant leave it to just the market. Take for example the move from combustion engines to EVs: In Europe its slow not just because of the car builders (they started as usual with targeting the early adopters with high prices slowing the adoption rate) but as important is the electrical infrastructure (the grid and charging stations). And this is far from ready for mass adoption and governments leave this mainly to the market to sort out. As a result of all this consumers are waiting and who can blame them: EVs are expensive and charging is not always easy and confusing (different companies with different charging stations with non transparent pricing structures etc.). Its all just too slow, confusing and complicated. Here China with its state command capitalism has an advantage!
I remember that Woodrow Wilson had to pay my grandfather to get rid of his horse and kerosene lamps
TVA and the interstate highway system ring a bell?
No, what is your point? None of these things happened in a free market vacuum. As cars were developed and became more popular the government paid for the road network for them to use. Where it didn’t make economic sense to provide electricity (rural areas) the government paid for rural electrification.
* CRISPR and synthetic biology
* Solar power
* Batteries
* Electric motors
* AI
CRISPR is a good start. A mere 48 hours after China gave the Covid-19 genome to the U.S., Biogen had built the successful vaccine. The lag time to distribution came because of Phase 1, 2, and 3 trials running concurrently. China has yet to produce an effective vaccine. Vaccine R&D and manufacturing is also a low-margin, unattractive business to Big Pharma, until it isn’t. The political will (Operation Warp Speed) and funding $250 million was the key ingredient.
Solar power will do fine in the U.S. The two political extremes of California and Texas lead the country in deployment of AltGreen Energy. Let’s throw in Iowa (wind energy) to mitigate those demographic arguments about density of population, etc. Again, the missing ingredient is political will. Take 30 million of the 60 million U.S. acres dedicated to corn ethanol and cover them with solar panel arrays. This would provide 2.75X the electricity needs of the U.S. Crops other than corn (eliminate corn syrup for high-processed foods to reduce health care costs) could be grown beneath the solar panels (e.g. soybeans for the Asia-Pacific market). Solar panels have 20% more productivity above greenery. In some cases, crop yields increase. Evapotranspiration of fresh-water irrigation would be a tremendous savings of this important resource and lower irrigation costs. If farmers receive revenue for producing electricity in addition to revenue from more-efficiently/cost-effective raised crops, you won’t need to twist arms. Farming is a business.
Batteries. I think five years out or sooner, the U.S. will be producing at scale batteries with more energy density and safer (technologies that mitigate thermal runway). Silicon anodes and solid state batteries will likely come from U.S. companies.
Electric motors: Who knows?
AI may be able to do work that would otherwise be done with quantum computers. Purpose-built transformer chips (SoHo) can run 20x the processing speed of GPUs. And use less energy, which is critical in re the exponential need for more electricity to run new data centers (annual rate of data centers built out in the U.S. is 40).
I think one of the reasons BYD is so competitive is that unlike Tesla’s, it concentrated its efforts on building a great EV, while not obsessing over autonomous driving systems. I don’t think most EV buyers and/or potential EV buyers give a rat’s ass about autonomous driving systems. They want an EV at a decent price, and consumers will be predisposed to purchasing EVs when charging-station infrastructure is more reliable and adequately distributed throughout the U.S.
It’s amazing what political will can accomplish. For example, the Manhattan Project would cost $250 billion in today’s dollars. It required sourcing tons of various materials that were in short supply because of WWII. The best scientists, business minds, cranks, eccentrics, conservative wing nuts, and pin-headed academics worked together because they had common cause: national security. What’s needed are better political leadership that can inspire bipartisanship. Covid-19 showed the world the U.S. isn’t that politically divided. We can’t afford to argue the politics of Covid-19 because we created the best vaccine and steered the economy through and past it with the various branches of the government working with common cause.
As Warren Buffett has repeatedly said: “Betting against the U.S. is a bad bet.” He’s lived much longer and experienced more than most. FYI: Charlie Nubger was the first major U.S. investor to discover and visit BYD in China. BRK.A followed with a large investment.
As for the future of space, here’s a list of the top three rocket launchers, all working on supersonic space transport:
SpaceX
China
Rocket Lab
Isn't that politically divided? COVID-19 saw America pay a huge price for being politically divided, anywhere from 600,000 to 1,000,000 lives.
"hydrogen cars — a dead-end technology"
Could you perhaps do a post on why this is true?
You may well be right (your knowledge of energy storage vastly exceeds mine), but on its face, a fuel cell seems like the best battery ever created: electrolyze water (using solar power); store hydrogen; use to create power when needed. No rare earth elements. No combustion. Light. Portable. Cheap to build. A little Li on the cathode makes the cell last years longer. For automobiles and especially for grid storage it seems ideal.
What am I missing?
One problem is that converting electricity to hydrogen, and then back to electricity via a fuel cell is much less efficient than charging and discharging a battery.
Hydrogen tanks also seem to take up more space than batteries.
The second point doesn't compute. At about 15,000 BTUs/lb, even propane is more energy dense than a fully charged EV battery. H2 is about 3 times as energy dense as propane (https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/properties). Whether by weight or volume, a combustion gas like propane or H2 is always going to come out on top. That's why electric airplanes aren't a thing.
As far as I can tell, the tanks are lighter than batteries, but I think the problem is that one lb of hydrogen takes up too much space. It is really difficult to store hydrogen.
It is easy to observe that battery cars are winning big time over hydrogen cars, even though both of these got a lot of research. Any images of hydrogen cars show all of the cargo space taken up by HUGE hydrogen tanks.
If you're willing to sacrifice some energy efficiency to do it, you can turn hydrogen and carbon dioxide into methane and then burn that in your car instead. It's got a higher energy density and the US already has a lot of infrastructure designed to transport methane everywhere.
It has also a lot of infrastructure to transport electricity.
I agree there is room for this though, airplanes spring to mind, but for cars the downside of an extra 1000lb of weight seems manageable. In return you don't have to deal with the PITA that is storing hydrogen, and you get much more miles out of 1kWh of electricity.
I was reading that the Chinese can now basically sell an EV for $10k less than an equivalent ICE vehicle. One of many factors is that Japanese, American and European manufactures have something like 48-60 month development cycles vs 18 months in China. The issue seems to be ICE vehicles are just so vastly more complex to manufacture it requires extensive testing and development to prevent brand killing recalls. An EV is so much simpler it doesn’t require that level of testing and refinement. But legacy manufactures are very reluctant to change how things are done.
Perhaps (irrespective of country) it's just easier for all-new companies like BYD and Tesla to get good at making and selling EVs, than companies that have tons of ICE baggage?
Well, also Chinese companies don’t exactly have anglobslcommitment to quality and suppprt.
Exactly and they don’t have a population with generations of automobile ownership experience. Essentially no one in China had a car before the late 1990s.
It is not at all clear that those cheap EVs can be produced without massive government subsidies. We have seen this many times with China: massive subsidies lead to massive over-production and then massive debt.
I think that you have it backwards.
Green energy policies only help China, and toss away our huge advantage over China in petroleum and natural gas.
Green energy policies do little to affect future temperatures and they undermine national security and economic growth.
The talk of drones being the future of warfare is confusing to me because I’m never clear on exactly how people are defining drones. It seems people are usually talking about small quadcopters?
The US has obviously been using drones like Predators for decades. Especially after 9/11. Do those not count? Why are quadcopters so special?
I have to point out that Musk is self-evidently a complete moron in his drone posts, and I think you're getting way ahead of yourself too. Drones aren't going to replace manned fighters/bombers until we hit an AI point where they can actually be made completely autonomous (which is rather further out than you think, in my view). Prior to that they're going to be limited to uses like what's happening in Ukraine now and loyal wingman stuff like the US and China are working on. The fundamental reason for this is that if they're not autonomous, they're jammable, which is a pretty massive vulnerability to intentionally build into your entire air force.
A jammer is also a target that screams out HERE I AM on lots of radio frequencies. A self-guided "blow up the jammer" weapon that's much cheaper than a cruise missile should be possible to make...
I'm hoping Trump and Republicans don't completely screw us, I have some hope because Musk is now in their camp, but we'll see what wins out: economics or culture.
Trump is a complete idiot and it was morning in America when Biden was President
Musk is not smart
Yes ten years ago when my son started working in the 'low altitude economy' as it was not called then, as a mechanical engineer working on drones, he felt pressure from the tech world to pivot to software. Hardware was for China; thoughtware for the US, he kept hearing. I'm glad he's stayed with drone engineering and manufacturing.
He has been at Skydio for ten years!