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The States also just got out of a war for independence, while the EU's founding members waged war against each other not even a decade before the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community.
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Mar 24, 2023 13:15
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there was also more of a unifying national project to the US founding, with ideas like the conquest of the new world by white christians etc those ideas are considered rather gauche these days, and also the EU seems to almost consciously have avoided having a national project at all, preferring to cleave very closely to its origins as a trade bloc which got way out of hand
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Mar 24, 2023 13:53
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V. Illych L. posted:there was also more of a unifying national project to the US founding, with ideas like the conquest of the new world by white christians etc Small White Dragon posted:When the US first became independent, it was a loose confederation for about 10 years - the Articles of Confederation were adopted in 1777.
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Mar 24, 2023 17:01
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Wasn't part of the early impetus for greater centralization the desire to be able to respond in a unified manner to veterans of the independence war who were owed a lot of money? Solved of course by reneging on those promises and beating them up. There were a bunch of problems with the Articles of Confederation. The US government owed war debts to other countries too, which it was unable to repay, as it lacked any mechanism to collect revenue other than asking the states "pretty please?". Also, there was no Executive branch, each state had equal voting rights, and a supermajority of states -- 9 of 13, I think -- were required to pass most any legislation. Nothingtoseehere posted:Civil war is the answer - the indervidual State governments were more important than the Federal governments for most citizens, and defined their identities more. Then the ACW happen, and the federal government expands massively to fight the war and try and govern the Southern states afterwards. Well, the Civil War was also about "do States have the ability to leave the Union?" to which the answer was decided, by force, to be no. Obviously the EU has taken a different path here.
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Mar 24, 2023 20:40
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https://twitter.com/TimmermansEU/status/1639553948179742720?s=20 Consider any attempt to curb ICE cars pollution to be officially over
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Mar 25, 2023 18:02
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We are so doomed lol
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Mar 25, 2023 18:21
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Lmao at making gavbot seem like a socialist Germany
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Mar 26, 2023 01:06
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Croatia's switched over airports to the Schengen mode as of today, so feel free to stop by: https://hopdes.com/news/croatia-joins-schengen/ Still pretty lame and overpriced imo, sorry 
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Mar 27, 2023 11:47
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mobby_6kl posted:Croatia's switched over airports to the Schengen mode as of today, so feel free to stop by: https://hopdes.com/news/croatia-joins-schengen/ Nice, I can finally visit Belgrade.
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Mar 27, 2023 11:55
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cinci zoo sniper posted:Nice, I can finally visit Belgrade. Belgrade is still outside Schengen tho.
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Mar 27, 2023 17:40
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SlowBloke posted:Belgrade is still outside Schengen tho. Beograd je hrvatski
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Mar 27, 2023 19:21
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Going back to the root of the EU powers discussion, the article definitely makes some overly-broad generalizations in the characterization, but I think everyone can more-or-less agree that EU rules basically set the boundaries of acceptable politics (Overton window) for all member states, but crucially in a way that allows for breakaways to the right but not to the left. The impossibility of making major capital investments in localized economies is a real issue, not because we should be bootlicking private companies but because they prevent more efficient operation of services as public goods. I think a week or two ago we were going back and forth on train regulations and such, but it is a top-down problem that makes any sort of expansive promise to improve the lives of constituents essentially impossible to fulfill, so the economic left-right divide is artificially constrained. Meanwhile, the crazy right-wingers are able to capitalize effectively on anti-EU sentiment because any punishment of rule-breaking reinforces the enmity, resulting in political gains for the crazies and adding instability to the whole structure. This isn't to say that those kind of right-angled slides don't exist in America, but the whole "Dark Brandon" thing is about being able to just turn on the money-hose to power wash problems, and that will never be possible in the EU as currently structured - consensus inevitably favors the status quo, and as people have pointed out it isn't as though a democratic system would likely end up any lefter at present. The key thing about "Dark Brandon" in this respect is the combination of chaos having a chance of wildly good outcomes in addition to wildly bad outcomes, and figureheads being able to point at things and say "that was me" when improvements happen. Given the political situation in the US, there was no reason to expect major legislation to get through, and even to me as an USAian it is still sort of baffling that legislation was passed at all given all the factors working against it. But here's the thing - between being able to twist arms within parties and reward loyalty with targeted regional spending and investment it somehow happened against all the odds. Obviously for Europeans this is a bit of a bad thing, but it isn't exactly untrue that the EU has its own set of protectionist practices - that's the whole point of being a trade union! And I think the article is right to point out the difference between the European way to solve problems (create regulations and bureaucracy) and the American way to solve problems (shoot money at the wall and see what sticks). Obviously the EU way is more "efficient" in that less money is wasted, but the American way does tend to get results too, and often quicker. And what, exactly, is "wasted money" when it comes to economic stimulus anyway? Sure much of it goes to ineffectual projects, and some percent gets pocketed by execs and middlemen, but people collect salaries to check that t's are crossed and i's are dotted in the bureaucrat model, so I'm not sure an analysis of overall societal spending towards goals would necessarily favor one over the other in terms of allocation. Even for the supposed winners of all this, isn't the lack of infrastructure investment going to catch up in the end anyway? The Germany thread seems to be constantly talking about how backwards and tech-shy the country is, and it seems unlikely that they will stop using fax any time in the near future, or switch to contactless payment when there is no way to call for that kind of large overhaul or incentivize companies to make those investments. Similarly, while Europe's military budgets were predictably anemic, is it not the case that what they got for the money was somehow even WORSE than it looked once everyone started assessing their stores of resources? If the EU bureaucracy is so effective at combatting waste and corruption, how is it that all of these governments are failing to find anything left in the cookie jar when it really matters? Obviously some of this is handwaving the individual agency of the member states, but the point of having EU regulations is that there aren't really outliers to the same degree. For all the talk of difficulties of federalization, the EU member states are more internally homogeneous than the 50 United States by a lot of metrics. Obviously that mostly manifests itself in horrifying things happening in red states, but it isn't wrong to point out that blue states are (at least potentially) capable of a greater degree of left-politics than the EU. My state of Massachusetts passed a 4% tax increase on high earners that will be directly used to improve public transit and public schools within the state - are there any EU member states that have done anything even vaguely in that vein towards addressing wealth inequality within the last decade or two? The stagnant economic policy feels so stark when you compare it to the actually really good things that the EU does with regulations in the realm of privacy and antitrust - it just feels like the decision-makers are playing with one hand tied behind their backs, and now the complaint is that the US is using both hands, but the people that made the decision to play one-handed are the only ones who can make the decision to untie that hand, and expecting the US to conform to those standards is pointless when, as pointed out, nothing has been done about China et al doing similar things for so long that it is taken as a given Eta: I think there is also some degree of "if all you have is a hammer..." to the complaints about the IRA. Certainly the types of jobs that the US is trying to create will reduce the amount of work going to the EU, but that isn't the POINT of the policies. The whole reason this kind of reshoring is necessary is because everything is in such a precarious balance with so much "just-in-time" nonsense. When you get down to it, we are seeing those chickens come home to roost with the impossibility of spinning up industrial production for Ukraine, or goods shortages and delays caused by COVID screwing up shipping. For that matter, look how awful things are going for the UK as a result of leaving the EU - they completely lacked the in-country resources to cover their demand for goods, and their service economy took a hit because banking and the like had good reason to relocate. When possessing the means of production is so clearly an effective cudgel, the only way to protect yourself is to build in resilience through redundancy - and Europe should want the US to have this redundancy! Constantly shipping goods through multiple sea ports to get from raw material to final product has a lot of weak points that can end up exploited, and if the US is going to continue to be the de facto NATO army, then they need to have the chip fabs and plastics production and whatever else feeds into that supply chain. If China were actually to make military moves, would Europe be able to contribute literally anything of substance to counter them, or would all of their supply chains get disrupted and everything come to a screeching halt, just like when Russia stopped the gas? It is depressing to me that these things are still necessary, I wish the US could have ever used their own peace dividend to directly improve society, but from a pragmatic perspective the European model truly does seem to be dependent on the "end of history" to survive, or at least dependent on global corporations and free trade never getting disrupted to any meaningful degree. Similarly, there's upsetting environmental news pretty frequently, and yet as we've already reviewed there isn't much urgency to green development in Europe, despite having an earlier start than the US by and large. The US is unfortunately right to demand that these things start being produced in the US, because often the goods are going to be paid for with a government rebate - it is objectively better economically for all of that activity to happen within our borders, and it is important that we train people to do that kind of work within our own populations (both USAians and Europeans!) because relying on external actors to solve the climate crisis for us is completely bonkers! If we want to have any hope of combatting things, we need to have massively more production, a bunch more R&D, and people getting paid to do the right thing - and Europe isn't ready for that kind of stimulus investment. There's a long-running USPol meme about telling coal miners to lern2code, but there is legitimately a lot of power in tying people's economic fortunes to societal good, so if we actually care about meeting emissions targets we should be trying to make sure that every country has a major voting bloc of people involved in the production and installation of green tech, whether that be windmills, solar panels, hydro, battery tech, or whatever. When you only have a small handful of professionals that do the planning and then you have some external company doing the manufacturing, you aren't going to create that kind of base. When you have an entire company top-to-bottom based on your region or country, you end up with a lot more people educated on the basics of the technology, interested and capable of assessing the validity of political claims, voting on the basis of success in the industry, and evangelizing to friends, family, and neighbors. You can tell what a society values by what it produces and consumes, and if creating economic incentives for both the production and consumption of green tech is wrong then I don't think we can afford to be right. I think this principle is a big reason why green parties are so often diluted or co-opted - there are so few people that have the education and motivation to vote green, so you end up with the faces of the party being middle-management fuckheads and then you pick your poison between fringe weirdos who think crystals are magic and nuclear is the devil, or other middle-management and emgineer-brain fuckers who decide that, actually, oil is green now and the best policy is the one that involves lots of consultants. In the ideal world, there would be enough people directly and indirectly employed in green industry to hit the 5% threshold or whatever the local barrier for entry of political parties is, and then that nucleus can add the appropriate ideological allies. Instead, the nucleus is <1% so they usually end up getting one person in parliament and the entire party is beholden to their fortunes and foibles and they have to squirm around looking for the crack in larger parties that they can exploit, even when it isn't internally consistent BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 23:01
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i think that's an interesting post worth a more in-depth response, but i would raise an objection to this point in particular:quote:Eta: I think there is also some degree of "if all you have is a hammer..." to the complaints about the IRA. Certainly the types of jobs that the US is trying to create will reduce the amount of work going to the EU, but that isn't the POINT of the policies. i think a lot of EU bigwigs think that this is exactly the point of the policy - attract investment capital which would otherwise go to comparable economies (in practice only japan and europe) to try and rebuild less geopolitically vulnerable supply chains in the US. the europeans presumably interpret this as an act of extremely bad faith after they just went all in geopolitically on the americans with the vigorous attempts at severing ties with russia altogether; this is a signal that the US is happy to exploit this sudden lack of options. to an extent this must be expected, but if they're *too* happy to exploit it that is a very serious problem for european strategists and so they're attempting to make enough of a fuss that the americans get the message.
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Mar 27, 2023 23:46
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V. Illych L. posted:i think that's an interesting post worth a more in-depth response, but i would raise an objection to this point in particular: You are basically aggressively agreeing with me here - yes the EU is interpreting it in a Euro-centric way, but by the same token it was WRITTEN from a USA-centric point of view. The authors are the ones with the intent here, not the readers, so clearly the policy was written to benefit the constituency. But it isn't zero-sum, and that is really the key thing here - the US may choose to export some of what they produce, but their largest market will almost certainly be THEMSELVES, and the next largest market will probably be Canada. The EU might be upset that they aren't getting the top-level R&D jobs, but ultimately I don't think most EU economies want the factory jobs that Biden is clearly envisioning here. If you view the policy from the perspective of people instead of capital, then it becomes clear that the reason for this isn't attracting foreign investment - that will probably happen, but it is not the largest magnitude effect of the policy. The most important outcome of these policies is creating additional jobs for Americans and providing the funds for retraining people in lagging sectors, and generally regearing production and consumption patterns in the mid- to long-term. I'm more informed than most on this, because I'm looking at the government grants that come out of these things in real time. There are big grants coming out for urban and innovative agricultural production, jobs for youth in green industry (including subsections of construction and manufacture), and improvement of local agriculture. What all of these things have in common is that they would make no sense as jobs for Europeans - we can't be shipping in European work teams to build our green infrastructure, the local food production is specifically to protect against future supply chain disruptions, and training people in green jobs is an alternative to the free college that was part of the most ambitious proposals (and we are still waiting to find out if student debt cancellation will go through). Much of that is to catch-up with things that are already standard in European economies, or to remediate the problems caused by having a very large country with very inadequate rail and public transit So to summarize, the POINT of policy is not to attract foreign investment, the POINT of the policy is to create a job program for Americans so that there are options other than working at McDonalds for people without college educations, to build institutional knowledge, and to keep employment as high as it has been, because even if the work is redundant or inefficient it creates a national project out of green manufacture and agriculture and establishes it as part of our identity. Even if Europe applies some huge tariff to goods from the US to counteract the foreign investment angle, we would still be doing this - that's how you know it isn't the POINT of the policy. On the other hand, if the policy successfully brought in foreign dollars but failed to generate additional jobs and green innovations it would clearly be regarded as a massive failure - we are doing this because we want to reverse the death of manufacture in Detroit and Cleveland and the rest of the rust belt, because ultimately Joe Biden is most left when he is talking about manufacturing jobs in the rust belt Like, to be clear, the EU is probably CORRECT to take retaliatory actions here, but it would be BETTER if they responded by also investing massively in green industry or coordinated to have an equivalent policy come out at a similar time hence why they are using a hammer on a screw. This actually has an interesting parallel with some US current events - there are a lot of people upset about the Fed constantly raising rates, because they (rightly) believe that this carries a high risk of precipitating an economic collapse. Why is the Fed doing this? Because they are politically independent of Biden, their objectives are specifically to keep unemployment at or below 5% and inflation somewhere in the low-single-digits, and the only lever they have is raising or lowering interest rates. Just as they are taking whatever actions are within their purview to meet their objectives, even when it would cause big problems if they were too successful, Biden is going to do whatever he has to for Pennsylvania voters, because his objective is (for whatever relative ratio of self-interest vs altruism) to make it indisputable that Biden caused positive change in those communities, resulting in a political victory for those policies and the continuation of his agenda for another term. When this goes right, it goes really right, as the New Deal demonstrates. It turns out that "give the people what they want & need" is the single most successful policy summary, not "austerity and balanced budgets", and for whatever long-term effects Europe fears (rightly or wrongly), it is very clearly a domestic policy aimed at domestic audiences for the sake of preventing another 4 years of Donald Trump BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 00:00
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right, but any large-scale subsidy arrangement of this sort is necessarily going to have serious distortive effects on the interconnected market, i.e. europe. i do not think that the foreign policy implications of this kind of act will have been entirely lost upon the US policymaking establishment - i know that the state department suffered quite badly under trump, but this is very basic stuff here. if they weren't thinking about the foreign policy implications at all, things are even more dire for the europeans than i would've thought. basically, imo the europeans are right to see this as deliberately aggressive, just like taiwan is right to be concerned about the sudden keen interest in taking away their vital edge in chip fabrication.
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Mar 28, 2023 00:11
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V. Illych L. posted:right, but any large-scale subsidy arrangement of this sort is necessarily going to have serious distortive effects on the interconnected market, i.e. europe. i do not think that the foreign policy implications of this kind of act will have been entirely lost upon the US policymaking establishment - i know that the state department suffered quite badly under trump, but this is very basic stuff here. if they weren't thinking about the foreign policy implications at all, things are even more dire for the europeans than i would've thought. I think the actual worst thing possible for US foreign relations and the NATO partnership is Trump taking office again, so when you weigh that against a slap on the wrist from WTO and the EU about anti-competitive practices it kind of doesn't matter. I'm not clear how you would even theoretically accomplish these goals without pissing off some people. Also, I think Taiwan is probably a bit more level-headed than that about the chip situation - the situation most likely to make it matter is a naval blockade by China, which would only be broken by successful military force enabled by the domestic chip manufacture. It would be more dangerous for Taiwan if the US DIDN'T set up chip production, as it would ensure that any military assistance would be too little too late as those same factories would be 3 or 4 years out, just like a bunch of stuff Ukraine needs NOW is 18 months to 2 years out There were a LOT of Democratic visits to Taiwan in the last several years, and I think they are a lot more concerned about having guarantees of our military aid than that whatever chip fabs we manage to set up will be meaningful competition for the high-grade and high-precision operations they have set up already - which arent able to keep up with demand and likely wouldn't be able to expand to even if they wanted! In this analogy, Europe should also be supportive of the US finally choosing to take emission reduction seriously, because the threat of climate change is much more dire than the particular location that global capital drops the money - the capital investment is 0-sum, but the emission targets are not, so the world is clearly a better place when more money is spent on real priorities. Germany decided to block their own shot on ICE, so maybe let someone else have the ball for a bit? Eta: sorry, I'm especially long-winded today, but you also have to consider that this is the only politically viable way to switch American consumers to electric vehicles - if you incentivize it enough, you can make companies stop producing gas-guzzlers through a rebate scheme like this. Demand for electric vehicles already greatly outstrips supply, creating a multi-year program to guarantee that it continues will lead to factories currently building ICE vehicles getting converted to electric models. It would be political suicide to band ICE vehicles here (only California is even making the motions), and gas prices are so politically important that you could never raise taxes on them to discourage consumption without booting yourself out of office (see the Carter admin and OPEC), so you have to make the alternatives cheaper if you want your movement to last long enough to enact a real change. Meanwhile, in Europe, you have this whole mess with the interconnected power grid and spot pricing being set at the most expensive in a way that fucks over consumers, and the various countries can't even do a heat rebate without running afoul of the rules because of all this BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 00:24
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BougieBitch posted:from a pragmatic perspective the European model truly does seem to be dependent on the "end of history" to survive, or at least dependent on global corporations and free trade never getting disrupted to any meaningful degree. Yeah, I think this is really the crux of the matter from European perspective. Ever since EEC, the fundamental impetus of European integration has been first and foremost answering to globalization and joining European interests together for trade reasons. So the reason why EU can't really think outside of global free trade terms is because it is the foundation of the whole project. It worked very well until it didn't and people realized that history actually didn't end with the fall of Soviet Union. With Russia being separated from EU economy, US enacting protectionist policies and global supply chains being perilous, EU really has only couple of options left: Negotiate with US into reforming IRA (getting rid of more odious things form EU POV, things like those tax breaks that necessitate electric vehicles must be assembled in North America. Like amending them to tax breaks given to all electric vehicles, no matter their origin. Would still be good for environment at least). And if that doesn't work, EU will take things to WTO and that will be a bad thing for US-EU relations. Maybe dig up the corpse of free trade agreement between NAFTA and EU. The latter is the best way to keep good transatlantic relations going in my opinion. Keep the globalized free trade going by moving towards China. I very much doubt this, especially with China and Russia getting closer. This would also mean break in transatlantic relations. And almost as unlikely scenario of EU forgoing free trade agenda and reforming into federation with much stronger protectionism from current situation. This would likely mean trade war with US and break in transatlantic relations. So once again, EU is totally in reactive state with options being continuing free trade approach or total reform of EU. Personally I think the most likely situation is starting poo poo with US through WTO and when that fails, EU will try to implement somekind of answer to IRA like 'buy European act' etc. But because EU is still unwilling/able to reform into doing away with global free trade approach and member states fighting about budgeting issues, the end result will most likely be a half assed trade war where US will have an upper hand and EU will be left behind in global markets. But this also depends on US elections of course. Were Trump to win again, I think it will become more likely that EU will be forced to consider reform.
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Mar 28, 2023 00:38
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I mean, the other silly thing to me about all of this is that Americans drive so much more than Europeans, and cars are so much more integrated into literally all of our society - why shouldn't we be in charge of producing our own for domestic use? Outside of the Germans and Italians, does this really have any impact on the broader EU? It isn't like the US imports Polish or Romanian cars, the objection is basically to productions and consumption happening in the same place - but from a logistics and security perspective that is a really important thing! The EU doesn't like it because theoretically trade is more efficient when everyone specializes, but it turns out that when Russia specializes in fossil fuels and China specializes in chemical compounds, you get really awful reverberations that shake the entire global economy apart, so everyone actually SHOULD have more than vestigial production capacity for things they absolutely can't live without!
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Mar 28, 2023 00:45
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I wish I could buy small European cars other than a volkswagen in America. I miss Renaults(don't make fun of me)
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Mar 28, 2023 00:49
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I think that the new technology that just goes into more efficient batteries and their development and manufacturing will have massive ramifications in future that isn't limited just to private car culture.
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Mar 28, 2023 00:49
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Glah posted:I think that the new technology that just goes into more efficient batteries and their development and manufacturing will have massive ramifications in future that isn't limited just to private car culture. Is the argument that America building these things directly prevents the EU from doing the same? Certainly you could argue that America will secure a big portion of upfront market share, but most of what they are securing is their own market share - which probably would happen the same either way through procurement requirements for the military/government. It's another auto-industry bailout for sure, but I don't see how it is going to harm innovation to a meaningful degree, and global investment in green tech is like an order of magnitude too low, so if America and Europe get into the green equivalent of the space race that would be a good thing Eta: sorry to monopolize such a normally-slow thread with walls of text, but the wheels keep spinning There are a couple things that come to mind that are sort of axiomatically important and not explicit here: - Free trade and globalization are not value-neutral - and crucially, they stand in the way of green policy if taken to the logical extreme. In a vacuum, free trade is a good thing because it notionally should lead to greater efficiency in production and equality in outcomes among partners, but the colonial roots of globalization have obvious deleterious implications for whoever is most exploitable. Typically we think of this in terms of low wages, unsafe work conditions, and other corner-cutting measures, but even if works are on notionally even ground, there are still other externalities to consider, and the one that is probably the most salient is pollution and waste management. It is hardly a secret what a poo poo show China is in terms of air and water pollution, and all the stories that come out about what really happens to your recycling or how computer parts get salvaged put an even finer point on it. On top of that the cost and convenience of shipping is a major factor, as well as the volume that can be produced and moved at once for related reasons. Given that, what is the actual cost of a battery from China as compared to one from the US for US consumers? The sale price is clearly not an accurate encapsulation of the total cost of production in labor hours and externalities, and that's before you get into Chinese government interventions that drive costs still lower. - Global emission reductions are a societal benefit and more important than making money. Obviously this is true to us as readers, but cynically speaking the processes that got us here are obviously financial incentives, or more accurately incentives that are intended to align capitalist actions with environmental and societal goals - The tax credits have to be funded somehow - taxes on worker salaries and company profits are how you square that budgetarily. The rebates can only apply for a relatively short time - there's no way to make them a permanent provision This is actually an unfortunate secondary effect of austerity economics - the method through which the bill was passed is called reconciliation, and one of the requirements for it is that is has to be budget neutral on a certain timespan, among other things. How did they accomplish that? https://www.crfb.org/blogs/cbo-scores-ira-238-billion-deficit-reduction Well part of the way was by reversing tax cuts for high-earners, and part of the way was adding taxes on stock buybacks and so on, but the story is at least partially IN the line items, which gets tricky. How do you reduce the cost of a measure that is designed to give a bunch of people a big chunk of money? Well the typical answer in the US is to decrease utilization - either a program is targeted as only specific people (means-tested), or has a limited window in terms of time or total recipients. Unfortunately, those kinds of choices directly reduce the efficacy of the measure as an emission reduction action, so it isn't desirable. What if instead you could reduce the cost per rebate? Well, you could decrease the overall size of the rebate, but that may also decrease utilization and lead to a smaller impact. How can you build in an increase in revenue into this expenditure without harming the consumer? The answer is by measuring the increase in the size of the economy and then calculating what the increased tax revenue is. How do you do that on a per vehicle basis? Well, you have to make certain assumptions - you have to decide whether you think aggregate demand is actually going to go up or if the good is a substitution for another good. In this case there might be some slight increase in overall car purchases, but your main expectation is that the cars purchased will be substitutes for ICE cars. Still, abstractly, for every $10000 the government puts into the economy in this way it expects there to be a certain percent coming back in sales tax (the average car price increase caused by the rebate), income tax (company profits more leading to higher pay or greater employment), corporate tax (the company simply makes more money and turns a profit), or any of a number of other assorted marginal contributors. What would break this assumption? If the additional workers are in places that you can't tax, and the corporate profits are on the ledger for a factory in another country, meaning they are transactions you can't access, assess, or tax. Obviously some amount of this is inevitable, but if you don't have any restrictions in the rebate itself it becomes impossible to know what ratio of domestic versus foreign production you are looking at. If you want to have the projected costs for the program as low as possible, you want to constrain it so that every instance of the rebate had a knowable amount of tax revenue generated, and requiring domestic production means that you can track that easily. Then we get to another complaint that people had - why are the rebates on such a short turn-around time for this domestic manufacturing requirement? Well, there can't be any added expenditures beyond a certain time horizon, so the rebate needs to sunset overall by a certain date. The final date for that is 10 years from passage, so, optimistically we are looking at only a handful of years when it will be in effect. However, the question raised was about the funds available to companies to incentivize them to start production on eligible vehicles, which have a much shorter timeline. Why is that? Because the vehicles made in those factories are supposed to be sold in that 10-year timespan, which means that they need to start construction NOW to have it finished in time to actually use the rebate program. It probably could have been 3 years instead of 2, but much longer than that and you aren't going to be contributing a meaningful amount towards the ostensible goal of making cars that are eligible for the rebates. - Someone has to make a thing for it to be bought - and if there are no viable alternatives then it will be the monopolist I don't have the exact numbers for international battery production, but from some cursory searching here are some sources giving around 77% being made in China, with the US at a far distant second around 7% and only Poland meriting a breakout in their chart otherwise. This is Li-ion specific, and I don't want to get into the weeds about other battery types, because we really only need relative magnitudes https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chinas-dominance-in-battery-manufacturing/ I'm going to go ahead and ignore the specific 2027 production projections in that article, because that seems wildly optimistic from a raw-materials and refining perspective, but we can pretty safely assume that the relative proportions would probably either stay the same or skew towards countries that deliberately invest in additional manufacture as a policy goal, which obviously includes China How much does the US use? From this article it looks like we imported almost 150 million tons in Q2 of '22, so projected over a year the guess would be 600 million or more https://www.spglobal.com/marketinte...20the%20period. This article, from earlier that year, points out that imports doubled YoY from 2021 to 2022 (there's a visible COVID dip in the graph, but localized to 2020 for the most part), and China's share of imports has gone up much faster than the competitors (which are Japan and Korea, not Europe). https://www.spglobal.com/marketinte...demand-69048550 I don't have any way to convert from tonnage to watt-hours, but there are several obvious conclusions we can draw: - Domestic production of batteries in the US is far short of what is needed to match demand - European production is a negligible slice of the pie, and an even more negligible slice of the US Imports pie. (Part of this is probably geographical - west coast to Asia is all water, while getting a battery from Poland to the US is probably much more expensive because you need to travel overland quite a few miles and then make a switch-off to water travel, and then probably further over land. Notably this is even worse for Michigan and the rest of the old-school US factory areas) - It is trivial to predict what China will do: they will expand factories, continue to pollute, and work towards global manufacturing dominance because that has been their course of action for like 20 years and no moves have been made to change it - Europe will not meaningfully expand battery production and export. There are several constraints - the raw materials are hugely annoying to get to Europe (all the major sources are on the Pacific), the EU has neither the capacity nor inclination to try to race US demand, and even optimistically Europe is a net importer at present so internal demand would likely get met before US demand Given all that, the US deciding to make a national project of battery production is a total no-brainer - the outcomes if they don't act are increased reliance on Chinese supply chain, and even if the relationship WASN'T adversarial there is still a huge risk to letting them manage such a big growth industry, especially given the recent memory of everything freezing up due to Chinese policy. What is Europe's counter-proposal even supposed to be here? They have no leg to stand on because they don't have a counter-offer: even if the US imported all surplus that Europe could generate we would still be well shy and have to increase reliance on China, and from a practical perspective the picture from the US battery imports market makes it clear what the situation is - Japan and Korea are the other major importers because they have car factories in the US. There are no Polish car factories in the US to my knowledge, and while there are likely some of all the major European brands they already have some other setup for their batteries - or they are just too small a slice of the pie to even show up on charts. The only non-German car brand I recognize from cursory Googling is Volvo, who apparently are working towards having a battery factory in Sweden - so I guess that makes for 2 countries that have a reason to be upset. The actual losers are Japan and South Korea, as their companies have already broken ground on US battery factories and that will actually impact the existing industry in their country, not some hypothetical EU one that currently doesn't exist. In all honestly, the main reason all of this exists is to reign in the domestic car companies that have consistently outsourced technical jobs to other countries rather than invest in employee training and local production capacity. All the English-language news about these things is about GM getting screwed by LG, Ford getting screwed by SK On, and Tesla having trouble with bringing Panasonic's processes up to speed for local factories. In comparison, European cars are like 8.5% of sales across all manufacturers, any damage to those brands is just shrapnel from the actual targets who are being hit. BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 18:36
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BougieBitch posted:Is the argument that America building these things directly prevents the EU from doing the same? Certainly you could argue that America will secure a big portion of upfront market share, but most of what they are securing is their own market share - which probably would happen the same either way through procurement requirements for the military/government. It's another auto-industry bailout for sure, but I don't see how it is going to harm innovation to a meaningful degree, and global investment in green tech is like an order of magnitude too low, so if America and Europe get into the green equivalent of the space race that would be a good thing No, was just saying that investment and research into these technologies isn't limited to area of private cars or their ownership rate in Europe. And that these things don't just affect Germany within EU. Like they just opened a big battery factory with future plans of expansion near my old home town (far away from Germany). They supply car industries and have R&D there. While concerns for German auto industry plays a big part of EU reaction to IRA, it is not solely a German problem. EU is pretty interlinked in this regard and what affects the industry of one country, often affects other European subcontractor companies. But I'm not saying that protectionism and government subsidies to industries stifle innovation. It's just that when you do it that way (instead of free trade, agreed upon international regulation and tax breaks etc.) it will lead to worsening relations between trade partners. Space race was a good thing for space exploration but it also was a manifestation of tensions between superpowers. Is the best approach to saving the planet through policies that worsen the relations between global players?
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Mar 28, 2023 19:12
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Theres no need to get into a hugely costly subsidy war with the US. The EU would be far better off spending an equivalent few hundred billion euro over the next five years on building continent wide EV infrastructure, replacing ICE public transportation everywhere, and retrofitting every dwelling to be far more energy efficient. Doing the above would create just as many, or more, jobs, probably have more environmental benefit, and have far more effect on improving the actual day-to-day lives of EU citizens. After all that has been completed then efforts can be made to lure large companies back, if many of them really do move significant amounts of production to the US. Better our resources get spent benefiting our citizens than benefiting footloose multinational corporations.
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Mar 28, 2023 20:01
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Blut posted:Theres no need to get into a hugely costly subsidy war with the US. The EU would be far better off spending an equivalent few hundred billion euro over the next five years on building continent wide EV infrastructure, replacing ICE public transportation everywhere, and retrofitting every dwelling to be far more energy efficient. Yeah, agreed for sure, and if the US had a way to meaningfully invest in public transit over cars that would also be fantastic for us - unfortunately we don't, both for political reason (empty land gets Senate votes, suburbs are averse to having public transit stops) and for practical ones (population centers are too distant for light rail, zoning prevents greater population density, no way to construct new stations without displacing residents) I guess to defuse the cold war comparison, instead of the space race its more like a mandatory group presentation with assigned partners - the US keeps missing the meetings where you assign the responsibilities, they make no comments or contributions in your slides, and then they show up at the very last meeting the day before the presentation with all of their slides ready. They didn't match the format that the rest of the team was using, they ended up covering some of the same topics and sources they you had assigned to someone else, but they actually did a way better job than you were expecting, and he says "sorry, I ran out of Adderall for a few weeks there, so I basically just snorted some coke and did this all in like 3 hours". You can either say "gently caress you man, we had a plan and you didn't follow it" and have to do the whole thing yourself, or you can quietly adjust things so the formatting is evened out and get an A. Yeah, that guy sucks, he's an rear end in a top hat, and you hate seeing him at parties and he is constantly making terrible decisions. All of that is true. But he actually means it when he says sorry, he really was trying to help, he even tried to do bit of extra work. And, even though you don't trust him even a bit to pass this class, you do actually crib his notes in your other class together, and he actually did loan you money way back when and never asked for it back, so does it actually benefit you to go tit-for-tat? In other words the US isn't an adversary, they are just an unreliable ally in some ways while covering the EU's weakness elsewhere. There are plenty of countries that can accurately claim to be worse off because of the US existing, but I don't think the EU or any of the constituent countries can really make that claim convincingly. It sucks that the US can't stay on topic for more than 4 years, 8 years tops, but the sum total of the changes in the IRA are actually a huge amount of climate improvements that managed to get through only because they are disguised as economic dick-waving. It's fine for the EU to complain about it, the complaints are accurate enough and honestly it probably improves the domestic political situation for Biden to be seen as prioritizing America over Europe in that way. With all that said, the electric vehicle rebate is like 5% of the total bill, and the impact on the European car market is going to be some small fraction of a percent by extension. Even the battery manufacturing bit can technically happen in other countries - just only the FTA partners with us. Europe probably doesn't want to be in a shared FTA with us, and on the whole that's probably the correct decision, but yeah it means you don't get the halo effect of our government spending in the same way as the rest of the Americas and Australia. We don't expect you to loop us in on procurement for NATO standard military equipment, even though that is kind of our whole thing, because everyone understands that you should use government spending on local employment wherever possible. Y'all were just talking about how the French and German firms were having a slap fight over who gets to make what of the components for the next generation tanks - would any non-EU country have been considered for something of that nature?
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Mar 28, 2023 22:37
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BougieBitch posted:What is Europe's counter-proposal even supposed to be here? They have no leg to stand on because they don't have a counter-offer: even if the US imported all surplus that Europe could generate we would still be well shy and have to increase reliance on China, and from a practical perspective the picture from the US battery imports market makes it clear what the situation is - Japan and Korea are the other major importers because they have car factories in the US. There are no Polish car factories in the US to my knowledge, and while there are likely some of all the major European brands they already have some other setup for their batteries - or they are just too small a slice of the pie to even show up on charts. The only non-German car brand I recognize from cursory Googling is Volvo, who apparently are working towards having a battery factory in Sweden - so I guess that makes for 2 countries that have a reason to be upset. The actual losers are Japan and South Korea, as their companies have already broken ground on US battery factories and that will actually impact the existing industry in their country, not some hypothetical EU one that currently doesn't exist. Oh, you edited in some more stuff. I'll try to explain more what I meant with my comments reflecting this text. I was alluding to future where it will become essential to have a grasp on more efficient battery technology as we move away from fossil fuels and how this might go even beyond just private car manufacturing in future. EU has been too dependent on Chinese imports and like you said, that might not be the most environmentally sound thing. Never mind the possibility of disruptions in supply chains, especially if US-China relations take a nose dive forcing EU to take sides. This issue is reflected in European Battery Alliance that strives for self-sufficiency in some critical components (like lithium) for Europe, R&D and tie the manufacturing into environmentally sound practices through EU directives. And as I alluded in my previous post, this isn't just a German issue in EU. In similar way that GM's problems aren't just an issue for Detroit or Michigan. The production chain for German industries are often spread across Europe so it does affect more countries than them. The company that built the battery factory I was talking about manufactures cars for Mercedes too for example. The problem with American policy here is that IRA will in effect stifle the potential for this European development to penetrate US markets in future. It's not that EU today has market share there with new battery technology (it barely has in Europe), it's that European manufactures will lose one potential avenue for their products in future. EU isn't saying that US can't support their own technology development, it is saying that US shouldn't do it in a way that forbids Europeans from competing in US markets in defiance to agreed upon WTO rules. And this is happening in situation where Europe has broken with Russia and is moving towards strategic autonomy in areas of importance from China, things that US foreign policy very much wants and likes. But now US is showing the stop sign to EU. So I get why people in EU are angry about it, in effect this means either EU has to answer tit for tat and go full on protectionist itself (extremely hard thing to do with current form of EU) or just throw up their hands and let US capture the European markets too. I'm like 50% sure that if Trump wins the next elections, EU will start mutating into some kind of Fortress Europa.
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Mar 28, 2023 23:40
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IRA has completely hosed the hydrogen and PEM electrolysers market in europe, to the point major manufacturers are considering scrapping their factories and move them wholesale to the US, certainly delaying a bunch of projects in the EU because everyone just went all googly eyed at the US incentives. Green hydrogen is one the pillars of the EU energy transition, and the EU already has poured a enormous amount of money, time and efort into establish a market for it. Theres a finite capacity of production for these things, and everything being redirected to the US will just sink the eu further.especialy in countries who cant throw massive subsides at it (so basicaly everyone but france and germany). Also, I dont miss renaults, dacias are the same but cheaper.
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Mar 29, 2023 00:05
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Antifa Poltergeist posted:IRA has completely hosed the hydrogen and PEM electrolysers market in europe, to the point major manufacturers are considering scrapping their factories and move them wholesale to the US, certainly delaying a bunch of projects in the EU because everyone just went all googly eyed at the US incentives. Good news! The Dacia Sandero is now available in the EU thread. Moving on...
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Mar 29, 2023 00:58
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Antifa Poltergeist posted:IRA has completely hosed the hydrogen and PEM electrolysers market in europe, to the point major manufacturers are considering scrapping their factories and move them wholesale to the US, certainly delaying a bunch of projects in the EU because everyone just went all googly eyed at the US incentives. I don't really know what is up with hydrogen as a fuel source tbh, so that may be a substantial sort of loss, and I'm not going to try to defend it as a specific outcome. On a certain level though, complaining that companies go where the market is best when that's your whole modus operandi just seems gauche - the justification for countries joining the EU is to get on their currency, have relaxed borders, and expedite shipping within the partnered countries. The US is inherently at a disadvantage selling products in Europe as a result, and this has been the case for a long time and yet the shoe can never be on the other foot. I'm not going to pretend like it isn't coercive to some degree, or even say it is a good thing that the US is doing it, but is there really a consistent standard being applied here, and is the EU really delusional enough to think that everyone outside the EU didn't feel economically coerced into joining, and that non-European countries don't feel excluded from the continental protection scheme?
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Mar 29, 2023 01:09
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the issue is that the present US policy is seen as consolidating important industry in the US at the direct expense of EU countries, by central EU figures there is necessarily a fair amount of hypocrisy going on as this stuff is naked politics of interest, but there is a substantial difference between, say, providing a relaxed regulatory envrionment to attract businesses and directly offering people money to move shop. i am not entirely clear on the mechanisms of the IRA, but from my understanding of the EU officials mad about this they very much interpret it as being something very like the latter
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Mar 29, 2023 01:34
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BougieBitch posted:I don't really know what is up with hydrogen as a fuel source tbh The second best thing is to use it as a way to burn piss. That generates on site CO2 but it can actually be captured easily, and it makes use of wastewater. What you then do with that green hydrogen, that's a different matter.
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Mar 29, 2023 01:38
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Antifa Poltergeist posted:IRA has completely hosed the hydrogen and PEM electrolysers market in europe, to the point major manufacturers are considering scrapping their factories and move them wholesale to the US, certainly delaying a bunch of projects in the EU because everyone just went all googly eyed at the US incentives. Frustrating to note that the EU was already trying to put sticks into it's own wheels with these proposed directives that total electricity consumption must decrease by 2030 and not increase. Which simply isn't possible if you are gonna decarbonize.
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Mar 29, 2023 04:16
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I mean, the mechanisms that seem relevant here are: 1. Rebates for home energy improvements. Some of this stuff is basically just a rehash or extension of Obama-era policies that basically straight paid for solar roofing and the like, but it also includes stuff like heat pumps and insulation. This is straight up a policy that Europe should have adopted immediately when the war in Ukraine kicked off, and I'm pretty sure everyone in the various threads was saying as much as it became clear that there was no real plan for what would happen if Europe had a cold winter. The consequences were avoided by the mild winter, but it was a huge gamble by everyone involved not to do aggressive policies to combat oil and gas dependency. 2. Rebates for electric vehicle purchases, both new and used (at two different tiers). The amount is $7500 for the new vehicles and $4000 for used iirc. For a car to be eligible for the rebate it has to be: - Below a certain price (I think like $55k for sedans and $80k for trucks or vans, it would only exclude crazy luxury models) - Using a battery that uses safely-sourced lithium: I don't recall exactly how it defined this, but it was something like recycled lithium or lithium that has been sourced from someone confirmed to meet certain labor and environmental standards. - Using a battery whose producer is in the US or one of our free trade partners - Assembled in the US The complaints people have been voicing seem to be some combo of the third and fourth bullet, on the basis that requiring it be made in the US is a de facto handout to US automakers who already have factories in the US, and the battery requirement fucks over Germany and Sweden who recently invested in battery factories and aren't part of a FTA with the US (and likely can't be, since it would probably break an EU rule) My response to those points is that A. The US automakers are absolutely not ahead in any meaningful sense because they are so far back on battery tech, and if they didn't get another bailout they probably would just give up on trying to do electric - this would be bad, because there is a major contingent of "US-made only, hoo-ha" idiots who will buy the least fuel-efficient Chevy they can from now to eternity, so forcing the big US brands to actually invest in electric and make a proper transition is a really important PR victory. B. I don't know all the details of the German and Swedish fabs, but there is such a demand for batteries that I don't see any way this would meaningful prevent them from making sale for European consumers. The existence of the rebate essentially makes eligible batteries a totally different class of good, so NONE of those will go to Europe, while ALL of the German and Swedish ones will get sold in Europe for the duration of the rebate. The markets can mix again when the rebate sunsets in 10 years, but this kind of protectionism is actually something that we know to be important after seeing the impacts of colonialism - if a country is beaten so badly on production for the domestic version of a good, they will just give up on ever developing it to compete. Again, this would be really bad, because there isn't that pronounced of a consumer preference for electric outside of cities, and the people in cities need cars way less - this needs to get adopted by rural areas in order for this to have a meaningful impact on electric miles driven. C. Japan and Korea were going to eat your lunch regardless of the rules, they are so much better at electronics than everyone else that it is insane, and the advantage of being able to directly ship across the Pacific would put them in so much better position that you would never be meaningfully competing on volume. The fact that we have FTA with them means they still can and will pound the domestic automakers - but that is also fine, because we are specifically working on countering China economically, so having a setup that benefits Australia, South Korea, and Japan is by design. Europe got their foreign policy bill passed when we fronted a ton of stuff to counter Russia, and our money will continue to pay for your goods and services directly and indirectly for a long while still. 3. Grants and loans to cover startup costs to build new factories, power facilities, and electrical transmission lines. This is a very typical US thing, and there is poo poo like Amazon shopping around for the state/municipality that will give them the best deal on land or waived taxes to be "job creators". I have no idea if anything similar is typical in Europe, but this kind of seed capital is both unsavory and necessary - if we want to actually meet targets for electric vehicles on the road we need to make sure the infrastructure happens. Our grid is woefully out of date, and there are likely a ton of improvements that need to be made to ensure that alternative power sources can be effectively harnessed and a bunch of electric cars can be plugged in overnight. A big part of this is just playing catch-up on overdue infrastructure improvements too. This is probably what precipitated whatever is going on with hydrogen - if there's been some vaporware plan "in the works" for a few years, of course they would consider taking that grift to the US so they can socialize the losses and privatize the profits. If there is a completed factory that is just getting deleted off the map, then either they were looking for an excuse or they are trying to play hard-to-get so Europe will give them more money. Hydrogen kind of comes across as a grift at present in much the same way that people promising fusion in 5-10 years do: the premise for it being useful is that you have a bunch of surplus electricity at off-peak and you can use it as de facto batteries or chemical energy to make synthesis easier. Since there is basically not any demonstration at scale to my understanding, this kind of sounds like the US taking on a sunk cost bullet for you so that you can exercise your energies on poo poo that will have an actual impact in a reasonable timeframe, like building public transit and manufacturing capacity and improvements to existing, reliable tech. As HDS points out above, y'all don't actually have your base load sorted, and European regulations might just kill it in the crib anyway, so pointing at the IRA might just be a misdirection to give cover to the fact that it just wasn't going to be successful and competitive in the current regulatory and economic environment There is another tranche with some funding for grants to pursue R&D and such as well that are intended for universities and/or nonprofits to make demos of alternative energy, which would be published and available for folks in Europe and elsewhere too. Edit: it's also worth noting that NONE of these will make US-made products competitive to European consumers - the rebates are for US citizens, so we are staying totally out of your way here. The US-made products will get a markup of probably half the rebate price (or whatever the producers think they can get away with), so they will all preferentially be sold to US consumers and it won't be economically viable for any US factories to make goods for Europe. This is sort of like how there are two different prices for oil now because of the sanctions on Russia - people that don't care about sanctions can get things at a cheaper price, and similarly Europe will be able to import batteries and whatnot for a much cheaper price from literally everywhere the US doesn't have a FTA with. If we DIDN'T do this, the induced demand would probably make the worldwide price of lithium batteries spike by some absurd number as manufacturers hoovered up all the available stocks and European consumers would get completely hosed - doing it this way limits the price shock to consumers in the relevant countries (SK, Japan, Australia, etc) and lets Europe continue to move towards electric-only for 2035 - or would have if Germany didn't trip on their own dicks BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Mar 29, 2023 |
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Mar 29, 2023 05:28
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BougieBitch posted:B. I don't know all the details of the German and Swedish fabs, but there is such a demand for batteries that I don't see any way this would meaningful prevent them from making sale for European consumers. The existence of the rebate essentially makes eligible batteries a totally different class of good, so NONE of those will go to Europe, while ALL of the German and Swedish ones will get sold in Europe for the duration of the rebate. The markets can mix again when the rebate sunsets in 10 years, but this kind of protectionism is actually something that we know to be important after seeing the impacts of colonialism - if a country is beaten so badly on production for the domestic version of a good, they will just give up on ever developing it to compete. Again, this would be really bad, because there isn't that pronounced of a consumer preference for electric outside of cities, and the people in cities need cars way less - this needs to get adopted by rural areas in order for this to have a meaningful impact on electric miles driven. I dunno about this. I mean a rural person drives more than an urban or suburban person. But there aren't as many rural people in contrast to urban or suburban people. So even though these people drive more per capita, the amount of driven miles in and around metro areas is twice as much as in rural areas according to the link at the bottom. So electrification and better public transit beteen urban and suburban (as well as inside) areas is IMO where you want to focus efforts to reduce the amount of miles driven. Along with rebuilding suburban areas to be less hellscapey and adding in a mix of zoning so you can live without having to drive as far, or even drive at all. Simply doing that would also affect rural drivers IMO as it would increase the number of electric cars and they would be more likely to choose one then. https://www.metromile.com/blog/average-miles-driven-per-year-by-americans/
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Mar 29, 2023 06:19
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This whole IRA EU thing seems a lot similar to the post 2008 annoyance in Europe of the various stimulus America then did. EU bureaucracy and Germans really hate it if anything is given away without beating up the recipient like they love doing to the southern countries.
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Mar 29, 2023 08:15
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While it is totally true that the US is inherently at a disadvantage in selling products in Europe, the reverse is also true: EU is at a disadvantage in selling products in US. And there's been consistent standard here through agreed upon WTO rules (well, standard at least, consistency is more shaky what with the previous WTO scuffles between US and EU) through which parties do trade. So the shoe has been at both feet. The issue here is that with IRA, US is breaking that agreed upon standard. And this puts EU in a position where it is forced to follow suit or just surrender potential benefits of US markets, lets US have the better position for European markets and possibly be affected by brain drain. The comparison to building up industry in colonial nations is interesting and poignant. But the exact same dynamic applies to EU were it just let US go through with IRA without a response of its own. While following suit with a strong response might be a good thing for European integration and ultimately for the planet through different venue than free trade + regulatory approach, it will change the form of EU away from its current 'end of history, let's trade' paradigm and it will do much damage to transatlantic relations. I wonder would a free trade agreement between EU and NAFTA be a better solution, but that is closer to a pie in the sky scenario.
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Mar 29, 2023 08:48
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Sometimes it feels like we're just so used to free unrestricted trade being a holy and sacred thing, so encroaching upon it the slightest is to some people like urinating in the churchs holy water. I do think in the long run a little trade friction shouldn't be that big a deal. Seems to me like having a free trade agreement between the US and EU would increase competition between the two, while it might make for friendlier relations at the top, I think it would make for worse relations among the people whose jobs are on the line.
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Mar 29, 2023 09:02
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While I see the benefits of both free trade and protectionistic approach, I do wonder what would be the consequences of latter for planet. I mean in a sense of what happens to global co-operative efforts in battle against climate change when countries start forming more and more adversarial blocks. Would it become harder to achieve global regulation when global consensus on trade rules deteriorate? While it is possible that all of these blocks use protectionism to build up green industries, I fear that it is also possible that some block will just say gently caress it and flood the markets of outside countries with cheap carbon intensive goods. But then again it's not like current approach of trade and impotent global regulatory attempts have seen wild success yet.......we're hosed aren't we?
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Mar 29, 2023 09:16
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Celexi posted:EU bureaucracy and Germans really hate it if anything is given away without beating up the recipient like they love doing to the southern countries. Germany has had a 6000€ BEV subsidy for 3 years now, long before the US. Heat pump installation subsidies are several thousand € since the beginning of this year and energetic efficiency modernization have been subsidized through tax reduction schemes for decades now. The problem with heat pump installation during the worst of the energy crisis was not a lack of financial incentive, but a lack of hardware on the market and not enough qualified companies/workforce to do the installations. Waiting lists are in the multi year range in some regions still.
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Mar 29, 2023 10:29
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Glah posted:While I see the benefits of both free trade and protectionistic approach, I do wonder what would be the consequences of latter for planet. I mean in a sense of what happens to global co-operative efforts in battle against climate change when countries start forming more and more adversarial blocks. Would it become harder to achieve global regulation when global consensus on trade rules deteriorate? While it is possible that all of these blocks use protectionism to build up green industries, I fear that it is also possible that some block will just say gently caress it and flood the markets of outside countries with cheap carbon intensive goods. no way out of this now, there's a war on. the idea of global coordination on just about anything is completely stone dead imo
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Mar 29, 2023 12:08
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TBH maybe we'll get something done then. Perhaps it's an unfair impression, but it seems like we've just been dithering and waiting for someone else to make the first move earlier. Like global cooperation was just a way for countries to dillute responsibility and try and avoid doing as much as possible themselves.
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Mar 29, 2023 12:09
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