The green energy transition may be a disappointment in Western countries, with high prices and unreliable power causing a political backlash. For instance in Britain there’s now a fierce squabble within the Labour cabinet between the “Chancellor of the Exchequer”, aka Finance Minister, who wants to drill for North Sea oil and gas cuz alternatives are too expensive, and the Energy Secretary who doesn’t because she’s against real energy. Also the Canadian government now boasts of suspending a fuel tax designed to price gasoline out of reach because it threatened to price gasoline out of reach. But it’s going great in China, at least in their minds, with high investment, futuristic power and none of that silly democracy. Heatmap gets all giddy that “The West Invented the Electrolyzer. China Is Building the Industry. ‘When China wants to do something, boy, they move fast.’” As they did in the Great Leap Forward when they made everyone turn on a dime and start farming according to Mao’s imagination not millennia of experience, resulting in a massive famine, Heatmap doesn’t add. Meanwhile Bloomberg Green recently gushed about China’s green leap forward: “Spanning power lines, mega-batteries and other longer-term energy storage, the effort has the potential to harness the world’s biggest trove of renewable energy and tip the scales in Beijing’s competition with the US to develop artificial intelligence. It may also provide a template for other countries wrestling with squandered capacity and even blackouts, as parts of southern Europe saw last year.” Or just serve as more proof that communism stinks, as tyrants fling citizens’ hard-earned money into pet projects that don’t work but can’t be criticized. Just saying.

The Heatmap piece adds:

“the analysts I spoke with agreed that China’s domestic green hydrogen market is positioned for a near-term boom, as the government pushes adoption across fertilizer, chemicals, oil refining, steel, and transportation. ‘Demand is really the key takeaway that I see from this new Five-Year Plan – shifting from production to thinking about demand,’ [Thomas Koller “regional hydrogen lead at the Norwegian energy and maritime consultancy DNV”] told me.”

Yeah. Pushed by the government, not pulled by the market, the state makes everyone do something that’s bad for them economically but fortunately China’s not a democracy so they do it or go to the laogai and do it anyway as even more blatantly slave labour.

Here in Canada where our chattering classes hate the US but are happy with a strategic partnership with China (and Turkey, of all places) it’s bad form to mention the various problems. As Blacklock’s Reporter writes:

“Cabinet’s decision to grant Chinese electric vehicle makers a 278,989-car import quota over five years marked ‘a new path,’ says an internal Department of Foreign Affairs memo. The censored eight-page document made no mention of slave-made parts.”

Well, no. Our policymakers fly into high dudgeon if Israel dares defend itself but slave shmave when we have a planned economy to imitate. As apparently we intend to:

“Cabinet on March 11 issued a legal notice granting Chinese automakers the guaranteed five-year import quota. The Commons industry committee was told May 4 that Chinese autos retailing for $35,000 are manufactured by autoworkers paid as little as $3 an hour.”

And why do we have import quotas? What business is it of the government from whom free people buy whatever cars they want? Unless of course they pose a nasty national security threat due to various embedded spyware like, uh, Chinese EVs.

Of course there is a sense in which it’s working. As The Bureau recently warned:

“Leaders Like Mark Carney Sold the West a Renewable Energy Story. China Is Cashing In.”

But as with the old Soviet Union, it’s not building a future that works. It’s leveraging economic dysfunction into military advantage through the inept naivety of our would-be statespersons. Not to mention their own fanciful feeble grasp of economics.

As The Economist just noted:

“China is turning trash into treasure on a vast scale/ EV batteries, especially, will help it secure supplies of critical minerals”.

It seems the PRC is making itself a premium destination for the clapped-out ugly mess that “renewable” energy creates so that it will increase its stranglehold on the raw materials on which we are dependent for the “green energy transition” as well as the finished products from solar panels to EVs. (And we find that finally someone in North America is doing what you’d think was obvious, namely mining garbage dumps on the theory that they’re more metal-rich than rocks far away, especially as all those lovely wind turbines full of exotic and toxic material are, as the Wall Street Journal puts it delicately, “waiting to be harvested”, aka have turned into ugly massive worn-out junk.)

As for China, and as usual with central planning, quantity dominates quality because there’s no way to make it efficient but you can make it big by pointing guns at people:

“Much of China’s recycling capacity is unused because too many batteries end up with informal scrap dealers (who waste much of the good stuff inside them) or are just dumped. In recent years several gangs have been busted for running illegal battery-collection rings. Solar panels and wind turbines, which are often used in remote parts of the country, present an even bigger collection problem. Valuable materials they contain (silver, for solar panels; and neodymium, a rare earth, for wind turbines) are present only in small quantities, making extraction trickier. As ever, China hopes its tech-enabled state can overcome such difficulties. In 2024 it set up a new state-owned company called China Resources Recycling Group to co-ordinate and streamline recycling efforts, with a focus on cleantech products. Recycling plants have started using artificial intelligence to sort waste more efficiently…. China says recycling already accounts for 10% of its supply of rare earths. It is trying to make the process more efficient. At present it is far more costly than extracting them from raw materials. Still, Chinese rare-earth companies, which are almost all state-owned, ‘do not rely on economic viability in all cases’, notes Corby Anderson of the Colorado School of Mines.”

Gosh. You don’t say. You certainly don’t in China or bad things happen to you. So do not try protesting against pollution as if you lived in some silly soft sluggish free society.

Curiously, the Bloomberg piece actually did acknowledge that thus far China has blundered. Though first it talks about the marvellous scale of the thing:

“To grasp the gargantuan scale of China’s green-energy revolution, consider Gansu. In this arid strip on the edge of the country’s western expanses, it is possible to drive an hour or more through barren landscape without a single break in the neatly regimented lines of wind turbines, stretching out to the horizon. To grasp the gargantuan scale of China’s green-energy revolution, consider Gansu. In this arid strip on the edge of the country’s western expanses, it is possible to drive an hour or more through barren landscape without a single break in the neatly regimented lines of wind turbines, stretching out to the horizon.”

And yeah, who wants to see nature, especially that “barren” rubbish aka a delicate desert ecosystem, when you can see “regimented lines” of Xi Jinping’s technology? But alas:

“The catch is that neither these households nor energy-starved industries are close enough to easily use all of that capacity. Much is sent to cities hundreds of kilometers away. Every year, more is produced and more is going to waste.”

OK. And it’s bad, right? But no, because:

“The first challenge in China’s clean-power transition was to build – at speed. The world’s top polluter embarked on a race to add more generation capacity than any other country, and won. But its second test will be even more consequential: figuring out how to use that abundance.”

Um isn’t that sort of like the Soviet Union actually outproducing the US in things like coal, steel and cement by 1980 and having it pile up in dirty rusty heaps? Yes. And there’s more where that came from:

“there’s a long way to go. More power lines, batteries and long-term energy storage are needed. BloombergNEF estimates the country will need to pour $3.9 trillion into the grid through 2049, well over a quarter more than what is expected from either Europe or the US.”

Because Europe and the US have democracy, and at least partially functioning limits on the overweening ambition and crazed dreams of tyrants.

Justin Trudeau took a lot of grief, though arguably not enough since he went on to become Canada’s Prime Minister for a decade, when he said two years before becoming PM that:

“You know, there’s a level of admiration I actually have for China …. Because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say ‘we need to go green fastest…we need to start investing in solar.”

But he wasn’t an outlier. It’s orthodoxy on the left. Including Heatmap with that “boy, they move fast”

So this admiration for the decisiveness of dictatorships is just as daffy and dangerous when they say it as when Trudeau did. Or useful idiots like Walter Duranty about Stalin a century ago.

Do they never learn, either economics or decency?