• ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.com
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    8 months ago

    Why wouldn’t he? BYD and other cheap BEVs from China directly threaten American jobs, and not the poorly paying kinds either. I see no rational reason why an American president wouldn’t do everything in his power to protect American interests.

    And for the environment I don’t really think BEVs in the shape of cars is the solution. Scooters and small motorcycles outnumber cars by far and is growing faster as well, while each individual vehicle pollute far less the sheer volume is a problem and the air quality problem they contribute to is massive. Those and trucks I feel are the important vehicles to focus on, for the environment. But it’s far easier of course to market and sell cars to high income individuals, in areas with the infrastructure necessary to support electric cars.

    • kora@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      8 months ago

      Then there’s the whole not recycling old Ecar components, especially batteries, problem. Transportation going electric will only be environmentally sound if the related recycling industries are brought to a profitable scale…

      Lovely catch22 from good ol capitalism

      • TwentySeven@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Batteries do get recycled, there’s a huge market for them. Typically they are used for solar systems on homes

        • kora@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          8 months ago

          Some, not all, and not every piece of the battery either. Lots of plastics go into the production of batteries, and almost none is recycled despite batteries not having the general worries associated with recycled plastics.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    8 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    And it’s just one of many BYD electric cars on offer, from the compact e2/e3 hatchback and sedan (think a Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla) to the full-size, luxe Han EV, a more expensive option nonetheless selling for under $33,000 in China (it costs more than double that in Europe).

    “There’s almost an across-the-board apprehension about Chinese EVs, even though they would make an important contribution to [lower] CO2 emissions,” Gary Clyde Hufbauer, a veteran trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, says.

    They took the “opposite of the Tesla approach”: starting not with luxury vehicles but ultra-cheap cars fit for taxi fleets and not much else, and constantly improving their early inexpensive prototypes.

    Bloomberg reported earlier this month that the Biden administration is formulating rules that would limit US sales of Chinese-made parts, even if they’re in vehicles ultimately assembled in the US or Mexico.

    As Frank Foer detailed in his book The Last Politician, this faction was brought into the Biden coalition partly through his now-National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.

    During the Trump years, Sullivan forged an alliance with the trade-skeptics and “broke bread with Elizabeth Warren disciples, labor union officials, and intellectuals from left-leaning think tanks.” Sullivan is also, notably, a major China hawk — Foer describes him as agreeing with Donald Trump that China is “eating our lunch” — leading to a hostility to trade with the country that meshed easily with that of trade skeptics who have for decades opposed exposing US manufacturing workers to foreign competition.


    The original article contains 2,617 words, the summary contains 254 words. Saved 90%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!