• humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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    13 days ago

    First, global warming needs to be a priority over nationalism and stupid/corrupt wars.

    One of the points of the article is that engine expertise doesn’t translate into simpler electric motor and battery skills. Still, the response to protect horse and buggy oligarchs will still fail, because even in US and EU, EVs are improving enough in value to displace ICE/dead ender autos. Enslaving your population to oligarchy’s expensive horse and buggies is a path to get the leisure class to leave for better quality of life countries.

    EVs in the west are still the future. EU is taking more of a tax revenue approach to tariffs, and are more vulnerable to new EU countries creating an auto industry with help of China.

    Yet nationalist oligarchy and national security are separate issues that the public gets misinformed into. Regardless of false accusations of foreign dumping, national security would invite stockpiling cheap steel and batteries and solar to enable cheaper local manufacturing. Subsidizing local producers with purchases is a better path to promoting local abundance than protecting oligarchs to raise their prices with tariff protection. Licensing foreign technology/robotics is step 1 in “stealing”/iterating on that technology in the future.

    If an alien civilization came to earth to trade advanced tech cheap stuff, the oligarchs that own your democracy would want war on the aliens instead. Though some of the oligarchs would still find a way to automate your job away, whether with help of the aliens or not, the failure of GDP as an economic health metric, is that the auto sector can gain a higher proportion of GDP by higher costs/prices, but consumers are prevented from consuming other goods to replace autos, through higher cost of living.

    Global warming is enhanced when sanctions and tariffs are countered with Chinese sanctions that would make EVs outside of China more expensive. EU is still not at that stage of “war”.