Yet another in the "Free market capitalism is weird and scary to us" series from the (increasingly poorly named) Economist.
Is it only China that freaks them out in this way? Is it to do with their long term sandbagging of anything related to climate change? It was only two years ago when they had a special "Solar power is actually a big deal" issue. And roughly the same time frame that they invited prominent anti-renewables advocate Bjorn Lomborg to write a column and praised his book.
The fact that they close with the suggestion that the introduction of even better and cheaper solar panels will in any way help the businesses they have discussed with giant factories that are already selling below their marginal cost is just silly. The continual improvement in a commodity product with big up front investment needed is the main reason being a solar manufacturer is a terrible business to be in.
The article was not about climate, it was about prospects for solar production and solar demand.
Is it possible that we see saturation with solar power production in Chinese electricity grid? With more solar installations will solar curtailment increase in China? Electricity storage is a possibility, but batteries in China compete with cheap coal power.
Solar PV and climate are intimately linked in fact and in propaganda, don't be silly, but ignoring that.
It is entirely possible to cover a plateau in demand in an industry without being weirdly shrill about the idea of businesses losing out to competitors, their share prices going down, or being surprised that competition leads to lower profits.
Reminder:
Magazine title: The Economist.
Focus since its founding nearly 2 centuries ago: free trade and free markets.
Leaving aside some technical issues with that article there remains one giant elephant in the print sufficient to upend it.
The date: August 19, 2025
Ask yourself whether anything has happened globally since then that has caused orders for solar cells and batteries from outside China to dramatically increase.
Though most of the people who say that kind of thing about Europe seem to have no problem with the people doing this kind of thing that is under discussion.
So was it a clear eyed critique of government policy or was it just idiotic support of fascism?
There's a dude in this thread openly supporting cronyism in government and there's been a general undercurrent of open contempt for democracy, so we can't really assume good faith and sanity from people.
It's a mix of bias, cluelessness and straight sociopathic malice that culminates into this insanity. We urgently need to establish a name and maybe even a pathological classification for it! People effected by this personality disorder should not be in any positions of power but eligible for professional help, therapy. If you disagree with this, then first seek a secondary professional medical oppinion from a Trump University Dr. med., before responding.
Manhatten Institute only begrudgingly accepted climate change was even happening a decade ago so they'll presumably agree with renewables being cheap after a decade or so of denial and delay.
You don't want your sophisticated propaganda to be too out of step with reality. That wouldn't be effective for your fossil fuel sponsors.
> Apple and Google power the mobile phones used from Dublin to Dubrovnik.
Remember when regulations bought Nokia and killed it while trying to leverage their monopoly into yet another area of business their tech wasn't good enough to win on its own merits? Stupid regulations.
And yet Samsung, LG, Xiaomi, Oppo, HTC, Sony, etc continue to exist, scale up, and/or directly compete against Apple or Google.
There was no reason another Nokia couldn't have developed in 15 years, especially given how a number of the brands listed either didn't have a mobile phone business or didn't even exist when the iPhone was launched.
Yet the biggest barrier for any sort of scale-out within Western and Northern Europe is bad terms and non-responsive local government.
There's a reason CEE states with more dynamics and business friendly administrations like Poland and Czechia converged so fast to Western Europe.
Which of these phone companies were startups in the last fifteen years?
The Chinese ones? And that's the argument for less state intervention? The success of Communism? Who also make all the Apple and Google phones not, in their own words due to low cost, but because they can't find that level of Hi-Tech manufacturing skill located in any non-communist state-planned economy.
The PRC embraced capitalism back in 1976 albeit with a state component.
Additionally Xiaomi and Oppo both developed entirely via private sector capital in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Furthermore, I listed other Korean and Taiwanese players that also continued to exist despite historically not being the mobile phone business until the iPhone announcement as well as Japanese players that were able to pivot and survive in a smartphone driven world.
The failure of Nokia itself highlights the failure of the European ecosystem.
Smartphones, AdTech, FinTech, Cloud, Fabless Chip Design, EVs, etc were all greenfield sectors in the late 2000s that any country could have staked a claim in. Plenty did, but the European states didn't outside of FinTech somewhat.
The crux of that issue is because there is a severe aversion to funding, developing, and incubating early stage founders and firms, and much of that stems from a mix of regulatory and policy failures within European states that make early stage ventures unrealistic or bias in favor of protecting large incumbents.
There's a weird trope in this area that exporting is good and importing is bad. Except of course they exactly balance each other. Someone has to import your exports.
It's a Trump-level analysis of the benefits of trade.
Sweden has lots of nuclear and wind both of which can be turned off, but in general it's much better for everyone to sell your excess if you have a willing trade partner and an interconnect. The rest of their grid is mostly hydro which has some amount of storage built in but also sometimes is equally "use it or lose it".
You can customize the costs for various thing and it has state level presests. You can also set PHEV utilisation factor etc.
I'm not sure how up to date it is, I see 2025 model cars listed but you can tweak gas cost, tax credits etc. if they have changed.
The very cheapest cars seem to still be ICE, not hybrid or EV but different state incentives/fuel costs varies it dramatically.
And you have to consider some other things like is the Nissan Versa ICE a comparable car to the Nissan Leaf EV? The former seems cheaper to run in the USA.
Wow -- Nissan TITAN and Chevry BLAZER doing their part to guzzle gasolina!
I used this to compare hybrid Camry v. RAV4 – both are clustered on the opposite side of the diagram.
Thanks for the neat link! I went from a turbocharged Subaru to a Toyota hybrid... and the performance is similar with 2.25x the mileage (and no premium gas)! It's neat getting 50+ mpg and still being able to accelerate.
In the early days of this the AI companies were asking for massive new energy supplies but also refusing to sign contracts to pay for it over the decades of its life.
They're basically attempting to game the system, politically and economically, to put as much of the cost on taxpayers and ratepayers as they can. This naturally slows things down.
Plastics recycling is fundamentally a technological issue. Europe doesn't have any magical technology that the US doesn't have. PET is the only plastic for which there is any industrial process that exists anywhere on the planet for closed-loop recycling.
Europe has great rates of recycling collection, but processing remains just as much of a problem there as it does anywhere in the global market for recycled plastic. Quite a bit of recycling that is collected does not actually end up being recycled.
Furthermore, Europe's recycling rate has declined over the past decade? Why? Probably the same difficulties that the entire globe faces -- China stopped allowing "recycling" imports because much of it ended up in the Yangtze. Now, a lot of the "recycling exports" are sent to countries in Africa with the same issues. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/06/90-of-plastic-pollut...
The reality is that the promises made by recycling companies in developing nations that accept the western world's recycling are not very rigorous to say the least. Much of your recycling sent to Africa is picked through for the most valuable stuff and the rest is burned or dumped.
> The EU recycled an average of 246 kg per person in 2023. This means that 48.0% of the total amount of municipal waste generated was recycled, compared with 37.2% in 2013 (199 kg per person).
Also, Starbucks apparently introduced a different compostible cup in the EU just as new rules took effect after promising for 20 years to introduce them
Don't get me wrong, the EU does a great job at reducing waste. But plastics recycling is primarily false propoganda created by petroleum and plastics industries in the 1970s. Most plastics are not meaningfully recyclable.
Those recycling symbols you see on the bottom of your bottle was invented by a US plastics industry lobbying group as propaganda to make you think all of the plastic you put in your recycling bin is being recycled.
Are you regulating the companies that did all this propaganda to make them either do it or shut up?
Or are you getting angry at the abstract concept of recycling?
You keep talking about plastic recycling, but the EU rules made Starbucks stop using plastic for these cups! In America they use a hard to recycle plastic and lie about it to their customers.
Make the corporations pay for it with Extended Producer Responsibility laws and they'll use less plastic. They'll make what they do use easier to recycle. Because it will cost them money if they don't.
If the companies ship stuff abroad and that's bad then ban it. Like the EU has done.
My beef is specifically with plastics recycling. Aluminum/steel recycling is, for example, a very real thing.
The issue with "plastics recycling" is that it mostly doesn't exist. The plastics industry wants people to think it exists so that they don't realize the only real solution to plastic waste is to ban single-use plastics.
> If the companies ship stuff abroad and that's bad then ban it. Like the EU has done.
> Regulation on waste shipments entered into force on 20 May 2024.
First of all, as that page says, they didn't ban it, they implemented new regulations on it. And the impetus for those new regulations was, as I said above, the realization that foreign "recyclers" are not recycling, they are dumping/burning/etc.
Unfortunately, those new regulations will probably make no difference, because guess what? The EU is allowing the exporters themselves to commission their own audits.
Now, they could have banned exports entirely, but they didn't. And the reason they didn't is because they can't do it domestically. And they can't do it domestically because the technology to recycle them at industrial scale doesn't exist.. The entire concept is built on fraud.
There is only one type of plastic that can be recycled closed-loop at industrial scale: PET. Literally every other plastic mathematically is guaranteed to create waste. Even other plastics deemed "highly recyclable" at best require 80-90% virgin feedstock, and so the total possible amount you can recycle is only 10-20% of what is produced.
There are multiple solutions to "plastics recycling" and all of the answer are "do something else", e.g.: switch to a different material, incinerate, sequester in a landfill, ban their use, etc.
Though specifically they would have welcomed sorted recyclables, but for whatever reason the US seemed entirely unable to correctly label the goods being shipped and were just shipping mixed trash and claiming it was something else.
Is it only China that freaks them out in this way? Is it to do with their long term sandbagging of anything related to climate change? It was only two years ago when they had a special "Solar power is actually a big deal" issue. And roughly the same time frame that they invited prominent anti-renewables advocate Bjorn Lomborg to write a column and praised his book.
The fact that they close with the suggestion that the introduction of even better and cheaper solar panels will in any way help the businesses they have discussed with giant factories that are already selling below their marginal cost is just silly. The continual improvement in a commodity product with big up front investment needed is the main reason being a solar manufacturer is a terrible business to be in.
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