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I hope that our tariff situation in the coming years doesn't leave us behind the coming tech curve. Our entire energy future in the US could be held back sever

I hope that our tariff situation in the coming years doesn't leave us behind the coming tech curve. Our entire energy future in the US could be held back severely if we are kept from adopting the best technology by politicians trying to prop up oil. The market must be allowed to choose the most efficient technology on its own. (And even the oil companies know that their future is limited, the only question is how long they can delay that future and how much money they can extract from consumers through higher prices than the alternatives.)

wyager 2y ago
I agree with the denotative message of your post (that we should let the energy market do its optimization unimpeded), but I'm guessing we disagree connotatively; most "green" solutions (especially wind, to a lesser degree solar) are only viable at all because of extreme distortions in the energy market induced by subsidies. Tariffs would of course also be distortionary, but it would be difficult for them to compete with the gross distortions that already exist! In the (loosely remembered) words of a friend who designs wind turbine blades and control systems: "we would build these things to be a lot more reliable if we weren't just trying to maximize subsidy revenue". I'm more immediately worried about these demand-side distortions than the hypothetical supply-side ones.
- jpgvm 2y ago
  Oil subsidies dwarf solar/wind/hydro/nuclear combined that is without factoring in socialized costs of pollution and accidents.
  - cscurmudgeon 2y ago
    That means we should subsidize local solar/wind/hydro/nuclear more and not allow foreign subsidized companies to decimate local companies.
- tda 2y ago
  At least in Europe, offshore wind farms (which are more expensive than on shore) don't need any subsidies to be profitable. The turning point was around 2018
  - mytailorisrich 2y ago
    Is that true? Recently (a year-18 months ago?) there were big headlines in the UK when no-one bid for a batch of offshore farms because the guaranteed electricity price offered by the government was too low for investors.
    - pjc50 2y ago
      The strike price is also a cap. It's not precisely a market; nuclear also gets a (much higher) strike price agreement.
- cma 2y ago
  Nuclear has many plausible trillion dollar accident scenarios. They are capped to a few billion in liability from a major subsidy left over from the cold war era.
cscurmudgeon 2y ago
I hope we add tariffs and use that to improve public transit and move away from all car dependence.
- saturn8601 2y ago
  Are you European? Because if are actually an American then you are just not operating in reality. I think after this most recent election result, we all need to take a step back and start thinking more realistically.
  - cscurmudgeon 2y ago
    I am American. I operate in reality. The reality in which China imposes any and all kind of barriers on American businesses while we can't do the same. That has to change. Tariffs are one way to enforce fairness (similar labor/environment/subsidy conditions). Also, cars being more expensive will increase demand for public transit, not all of which needs federal funding.
    - contrarian1234 2y ago
      Unfair...? That's some kindergarten level logic to international trade If you're aware of David Ricardo and the concept of "comparative advantage" then you'd know banning foreign companies only hurts the country in question
- wombatpm 2y ago
  Ride public transportation. I do, and the train cars on my line are made in Japan
  - cscurmudgeon 2y ago
    Japan is an ally and a democratic nation with much less unfair trade practices. So, not an issue.
    - 2y ago
fastball 2y ago
I think you might be confusing economic tactics. Tariffs don't discourage adoption of the best technologies, they discourage importing products from other countries. If solar/wind/batteries/nuclear/hydro/whatever is better than oil, and there are high tariffs, the result will be onshore production of those technologies. What gets in the way of that is subsidies, not tariffs. Unless there is an underlying assumption that the US is incapable of producing these better technologies itself, in which case the US is probably fucked regardless.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >Unless there is an underlying assumption that the US is incapable of producing these better technologies itself, in which case the US is probably fucked regardless. That seems to be a safe assumption these days: I just don't see the US producing these better technologies itself at all. It's still pretty good at making cutting-edge software, but that's about it.
  - quasse 2y ago
    > It's still pretty good at making cutting-edge software, but that's about it Chinese software engineering seems to be catching up extremely fast in this regard too. I'm surprised how often I find an interesting new open source tool or library on GitHub and the comments in the code are all in Mandarin.
    - est 2y ago
      Chinese devs were never behind, they just don't contribute much in the past and very few were active in open source community.
    - darkstar_16 2y ago
      This is true. So many CNCF projects for example these days have a lot of contributions from Chinese devs or originate from companies like Alibaba/Tencent etc
- redonyo 2y ago
abracadaniel 2y ago
The existing and impending protectionism almost guarantees the US car manufacturers are screwed. The rest of the world is already buying loads of BYDs, so US car makers are already competing with them and losing badly. They’ll be relegated to only being viable options in the US. Then we’ll be left with expensive and inefficient cars until we eventually give up on propping them up.
- saturn8601 2y ago
  The exceptions being Tesla and possibly Rivian and Lucid. With Tesla you know that Musk will find a way to keep going either by hook or by crook. Rivian is in a more uncertain situation but they have shown that they have the mindset of a SV company like Tesla and so we can't write them off yet. Finally Lucid seems to have a large well of cash from the Saudis so they may stick around as a niche maker.
  - KennyBlanken 2y ago
    Rivian isn't doing so hot; they're still losing money like it's going out of style. Lucid is doing far better.
    - boredatoms 2y ago
      Thats the SV way though, rivian will do ok
- KennyBlanken 2y ago
  Which is why a bunch of this will never happen. They have a boatload of money sunk into EVs and the only thing more powerful than christian nationalists are corporations, especially auto manufacturers. A large number of red states have foreign car company factories. If those scale back or shut down, people are going to be pissed. Dollars to donuts all those car companies have plant idling and layoff plans all drawn up and ready to go the second tariffs come in. I half want to see it for the /r/leopardsatetheirfaces moment. Who would have thought it'd be unwise to have a man who bankrupted multiple casinos (by shuffling personal debts into them), an entire sports league, an airline, and failed to sell alcohol and beef to Americans...be put in charge of a national economy. He'll make a lot of bluster, Big Three will tell him to knock it the fuck off, he'll find someone to blame for his base (probably the auto company execs), and go back to eating Hamberders while staring at a national security brief written at a 3rd grade English level.
mytailorisrich 2y ago
Trump is using big stick tactics by threatening huge tariffs in order to force negotiation. That's what he does and there is no need to panic at this point. He's not even President yet and Europe is already offering concessions to avoid tariffs, for instance. It works because people think he is fully willing to deliver on his threats.
- righthand 2y ago
  He is fully willing to deliver on his threats. He did it his first term. The tariffs are coming. You don’t rile up hundreds of millions of people with hateful lies to back out of promising tarrifs will fix everything. If you think Trump is all talk in order to negotiate then you are sorely mistaken and you are one of the suckers he’s selling to.
  - mytailorisrich 2y ago
    Did the US and the world collapse in his first term? (Well, ignore Covid) I am not saying that he is all talk. I am saying that he is a master of hyperbolic threats followed by a more nuanced reality. I can't understand the level of aggressivity and panic (from some) over Trump's reelection. "Keep calm and carry on" as we say in the UK...
    - righthand 2y ago
      Why are you talking about world collapse? You stated that Trump’s tarrifs are just a threat and negotiating tactic and there’s nothing to worry about. I replied that Trumps tarrifs aren’t a threat and the he’s used tarrifs before. Your response is that it’s okay because the world didn’t collapse in 4 years? You’re moving the goal posts. The tarrifs are going to be bad. Will it collapse the world? It may for some that aren’t expecting to pay higher prices for goods, especially people that just voted for Mr Tarrifs because they blamed the previous leader for high inflation. Inflation is something no POTUS can do anything about, but tarrifs are. So in the spirit of continued high prices, yes the world is collapsing. I don’t know if you’ve noticed the panic Trump has caused with xenophobia the past 20+ years but none of those voters believe in the phrase “Keep calm and carry on”. Just because you were not directly affected by Trump’s first term does not mean you can wave away other people’s concerns as not problems.
owenversteeg 2y ago
Hah. We're already way behind the tech curve on anything physical. Propping up oil doesn't help, but it isn't the problem by a long shot. China props up coal and it certainly doesn't hurt their manufacturing. The problem is that we can't build anything in this country, with a handful of very expensive exceptions. If the US wants to change that, we have to send a planeload of senators to Shenzhen and copy fucking everything. Take detailed notes and copy JLCPCB, LCSC, Alibaba, Foxconn, all the raw material suppliers, all the chemical suppliers. Build a new EEZ near NYC or SF and invest $1 trillion over 10 years (5% of discretionary spending.) Write up a few laws: every business must have fast turnaround, thin margins, and instant quotes. In a decade every product in the world would be made in America. It wouldn't even be hard; that number is ~10% of military spending and all of those companies will voluntarily give you a detailed tour. It's not like we don't understand any of this stuff. Etching a PCB or running a warehouse or spot-welding some crap is relatively simple. Everyone thinks China leads the world in manufacturing because of labor costs. Ha, no. China's far richer now. It started out as the labor costs, but now it's the vertical integration. You can go from prototype to product in a month in China. Try doing that in the US; it'll take a month just to get your calls returned, and you'll find that we don't and we can't make shit. At scale, we can't make foam, we can't mold plastic, and we can't make PCBs. More to the original subject, at scale we can't coat electrodes, we can't process chemicals, and we can't work metal; put that all together and we sure as shit can't make batteries.
- dzhiurgis 2y ago
  > put that all together and we sure as shit can't make batteries. US is a second largest battery maker
  - gibolt 2y ago
    It is also the second largest consumer of them (making local production a good option). Excluding Tesla's in house production, all other battery makers of any scale are foreign companies.
    - giva 2y ago

wyager 2y ago

I agree with the denotative message of your post (that we should let the energy market do its optimization unimpeded), but I'm guessing we disagree connotatively; most "green" solutions (especially wind, to a lesser degree solar) are only viable at all because of extreme distortions in the energy market induced by subsidies. Tariffs would of course also be distortionary, but it would be difficult for them to compete with the gross distortions that already exist! In the (loosely remembered) words of a friend who designs wind turbine blades and control systems: "we would build these things to be a lot more reliable if we weren't just trying to maximize subsidy revenue". I'm more immediately worried about these demand-side distortions than the hypothetical supply-side ones.

jpgvm 2y ago
Oil subsidies dwarf solar/wind/hydro/nuclear combined that is without factoring in socialized costs of pollution and accidents.
- cscurmudgeon 2y ago
  That means we should subsidize local solar/wind/hydro/nuclear more and not allow foreign subsidized companies to decimate local companies.
tda 2y ago
At least in Europe, offshore wind farms (which are more expensive than on shore) don't need any subsidies to be profitable. The turning point was around 2018
- mytailorisrich 2y ago
  Is that true? Recently (a year-18 months ago?) there were big headlines in the UK when no-one bid for a batch of offshore farms because the guaranteed electricity price offered by the government was too low for investors.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    The strike price is also a cap. It's not precisely a market; nuclear also gets a (much higher) strike price agreement.
cma 2y ago
Nuclear has many plausible trillion dollar accident scenarios. They are capped to a few billion in liability from a major subsidy left over from the cold war era.

cscurmudgeon 2y ago

I hope we add tariffs and use that to improve public transit and move away from all car dependence.

saturn8601 2y ago
Are you European? Because if are actually an American then you are just not operating in reality. I think after this most recent election result, we all need to take a step back and start thinking more realistically.
- cscurmudgeon 2y ago
  I am American. I operate in reality. The reality in which China imposes any and all kind of barriers on American businesses while we can't do the same. That has to change. Tariffs are one way to enforce fairness (similar labor/environment/subsidy conditions). Also, cars being more expensive will increase demand for public transit, not all of which needs federal funding.
  - contrarian1234 2y ago
    Unfair...? That's some kindergarten level logic to international trade If you're aware of David Ricardo and the concept of "comparative advantage" then you'd know banning foreign companies only hurts the country in question
wombatpm 2y ago
Ride public transportation. I do, and the train cars on my line are made in Japan
- cscurmudgeon 2y ago
  Japan is an ally and a democratic nation with much less unfair trade practices. So, not an issue.
  - 2y ago

fastball 2y ago

I think you might be confusing economic tactics. Tariffs don't discourage adoption of the best technologies, they discourage importing products from other countries. If solar/wind/batteries/nuclear/hydro/whatever is better than oil, and there are high tariffs, the result will be onshore production of those technologies. What gets in the way of that is subsidies, not tariffs. Unless there is an underlying assumption that the US is incapable of producing these better technologies itself, in which case the US is probably fucked regardless.

shiroiushi 2y ago
>Unless there is an underlying assumption that the US is incapable of producing these better technologies itself, in which case the US is probably fucked regardless. That seems to be a safe assumption these days: I just don't see the US producing these better technologies itself at all. It's still pretty good at making cutting-edge software, but that's about it.
- quasse 2y ago
  > It's still pretty good at making cutting-edge software, but that's about it Chinese software engineering seems to be catching up extremely fast in this regard too. I'm surprised how often I find an interesting new open source tool or library on GitHub and the comments in the code are all in Mandarin.
  - est 2y ago
    Chinese devs were never behind, they just don't contribute much in the past and very few were active in open source community.
  - darkstar_16 2y ago
    This is true. So many CNCF projects for example these days have a lot of contributions from Chinese devs or originate from companies like Alibaba/Tencent etc
redonyo 2y ago

abracadaniel 2y ago

The existing and impending protectionism almost guarantees the US car manufacturers are screwed. The rest of the world is already buying loads of BYDs, so US car makers are already competing with them and losing badly. They’ll be relegated to only being viable options in the US. Then we’ll be left with expensive and inefficient cars until we eventually give up on propping them up.

saturn8601 2y ago
The exceptions being Tesla and possibly Rivian and Lucid. With Tesla you know that Musk will find a way to keep going either by hook or by crook. Rivian is in a more uncertain situation but they have shown that they have the mindset of a SV company like Tesla and so we can't write them off yet. Finally Lucid seems to have a large well of cash from the Saudis so they may stick around as a niche maker.
- KennyBlanken 2y ago
  Rivian isn't doing so hot; they're still losing money like it's going out of style. Lucid is doing far better.
  - boredatoms 2y ago
    Thats the SV way though, rivian will do ok
KennyBlanken 2y ago
Which is why a bunch of this will never happen. They have a boatload of money sunk into EVs and the only thing more powerful than christian nationalists are corporations, especially auto manufacturers. A large number of red states have foreign car company factories. If those scale back or shut down, people are going to be pissed. Dollars to donuts all those car companies have plant idling and layoff plans all drawn up and ready to go the second tariffs come in. I half want to see it for the /r/leopardsatetheirfaces moment. Who would have thought it'd be unwise to have a man who bankrupted multiple casinos (by shuffling personal debts into them), an entire sports league, an airline, and failed to sell alcohol and beef to Americans...be put in charge of a national economy. He'll make a lot of bluster, Big Three will tell him to knock it the fuck off, he'll find someone to blame for his base (probably the auto company execs), and go back to eating Hamberders while staring at a national security brief written at a 3rd grade English level.

mytailorisrich 2y ago

Trump is using big stick tactics by threatening huge tariffs in order to force negotiation. That's what he does and there is no need to panic at this point. He's not even President yet and Europe is already offering concessions to avoid tariffs, for instance. It works because people think he is fully willing to deliver on his threats.

righthand 2y ago
He is fully willing to deliver on his threats. He did it his first term. The tariffs are coming. You don’t rile up hundreds of millions of people with hateful lies to back out of promising tarrifs will fix everything. If you think Trump is all talk in order to negotiate then you are sorely mistaken and you are one of the suckers he’s selling to.
- mytailorisrich 2y ago
  Did the US and the world collapse in his first term? (Well, ignore Covid) I am not saying that he is all talk. I am saying that he is a master of hyperbolic threats followed by a more nuanced reality. I can't understand the level of aggressivity and panic (from some) over Trump's reelection. "Keep calm and carry on" as we say in the UK...
  - righthand 2y ago
    Why are you talking about world collapse? You stated that Trump’s tarrifs are just a threat and negotiating tactic and there’s nothing to worry about. I replied that Trumps tarrifs aren’t a threat and the he’s used tarrifs before. Your response is that it’s okay because the world didn’t collapse in 4 years? You’re moving the goal posts. The tarrifs are going to be bad. Will it collapse the world? It may for some that aren’t expecting to pay higher prices for goods, especially people that just voted for Mr Tarrifs because they blamed the previous leader for high inflation. Inflation is something no POTUS can do anything about, but tarrifs are. So in the spirit of continued high prices, yes the world is collapsing. I don’t know if you’ve noticed the panic Trump has caused with xenophobia the past 20+ years but none of those voters believe in the phrase “Keep calm and carry on”. Just because you were not directly affected by Trump’s first term does not mean you can wave away other people’s concerns as not problems.

owenversteeg 2y ago

Hah. We're already way behind the tech curve on anything physical. Propping up oil doesn't help, but it isn't the problem by a long shot. China props up coal and it certainly doesn't hurt their manufacturing. The problem is that we can't build anything in this country, with a handful of very expensive exceptions. If the US wants to change that, we have to send a planeload of senators to Shenzhen and copy fucking everything. Take detailed notes and copy JLCPCB, LCSC, Alibaba, Foxconn, all the raw material suppliers, all the chemical suppliers. Build a new EEZ near NYC or SF and invest $1 trillion over 10 years (5% of discretionary spending.) Write up a few laws: every business must have fast turnaround, thin margins, and instant quotes. In a decade every product in the world would be made in America. It wouldn't even be hard; that number is ~10% of military spending and all of those companies will voluntarily give you a detailed tour. It's not like we don't understand any of this stuff. Etching a PCB or running a warehouse or spot-welding some crap is relatively simple. Everyone thinks China leads the world in manufacturing because of labor costs. Ha, no. China's far richer now. It started out as the labor costs, but now it's the vertical integration. You can go from prototype to product in a month in China. Try doing that in the US; it'll take a month just to get your calls returned, and you'll find that we don't and we can't make shit. At scale, we can't make foam, we can't mold plastic, and we can't make PCBs. More to the original subject, at scale we can't coat electrodes, we can't process chemicals, and we can't work metal; put that all together and we sure as shit can't make batteries.

dzhiurgis 2y ago
> put that all together and we sure as shit can't make batteries. US is a second largest battery maker
- gibolt 2y ago
  It is also the second largest consumer of them (making local production a good option). Excluding Tesla's in house production, all other battery makers of any scale are foreign companies.
  - giva 2y ago