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

[–] FloridaBoi@hexbear.net 26 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] Assian_Candor@hexbear.net 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] FloridaBoi@hexbear.net 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Assian_Candor@hexbear.net 11 points 2 months ago

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