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I mean, electrification is one area where China is significantly and undoubtedly outdoing every single democracy out there. How democratic China is has no bearing on that fact.
Norway walks into the room.
Remind me, does Norway have electric trucks or does every household have an extra Tesla parked right beside their BMW?
It does matter because this is totally what chinese state propaganda is broadcasting to the world. The old playbook the soviets have been doing
That might be but then you have Audi with 87% less profit compared to the year before and that's not Chinese propaganda. He might be wrong about the trucks but he isn't about electrification.
It also happens to be true.
They also are using a ton of coal and oil to recharge them.
They get away with looking better on per capita CO2 production because they have such a huge population, but it’s not all solar panels and rainbows there by any means.
Their electrical grid is old and can't handle the crazy amount of solar energy they're producing. So they need to run coal plants to keep providing power.
Even then EVs are better because they're more efficient (requiring less fossil fuels per unit distance), but also almost half of China's energy comes from green energy. Taken together this is objectively good.
I don't know if I agree. A dictatorship decides to make more batteries and so the industry bends. Land is taken by the state to build mines. Little regard for the people or the environment.
All of this makes it easier for China to just move to electric, and part of why the EVs they export are so cheap.
They subsidise by environmental impact and possibly human suffering.
* Not to mention they own the battery market.
I don’t think there’s a country in the developed world with a government that finds it distasteful to subsidize the consumption of their populace with environmental and human suffering. Moral superiority isn’t the difference being spotlit here. I think China just controls more manufacturing of its own which makes pivoting their society more efficient
The question was about politics and economics, not morals.
I would hope not supporting suffering and destruction doesn't need to be explicitly stated to be understood.
I'm not sure the argument "EVs are bad for the environment actually" works as well as you think it does.
I wasn't arguing that. The way China mines and processes lithium for battery manufacture, in which they're the leading exporter by far due to their rich rare earth deposits, is destroying the surrounding areas.
That's fair, but my point is: Is there any way to make lithium ion batteries otherwise? Like is there any evidence that for instance Australian lithium is "greener" so to speak?
I see, yes my understanding is that the process can be a lot cleaner and other countries do it (like the US), China just chooses to take cheap shortcuts to take stranglehold of the market, which they now have.
I live in Canada and they're building an LNG plant in my town. Nobody who lives here wants it but the federal government and province do so we can't do shit about it lol.
A nation taking land for its strategic needs is called "expropriation". I don't know your country, but I'm sure it does that as well, because this is something all of them do.