How Trump’s right-wing wokeism will make China great again

medium117734304I understand that Donald Trump was elected to better manage our borders and curb left-wing wokeism. But have no illusions: Trump’s right-wing wokeism — impugning electric vehicles (EVs) and renewable energy because they don’t conform to MAGA ideology and aren’t manly enough — is as devoid of common sense and not remotely in the national interest as any left-wing cultural wokeism.It’s not even in the interest of his own base: The five states with the largest share of wind power in America are red states. They generated at least a third of their power from wind. This is geography, not politics: Rural districts across the middle of America have the most solar and wind energy potential. They know it and are taking advantage of it — even if they vote Republican.Most important: If Trump’s all-in-on-fossil-fuels, “drill, baby, drill” rallying cry — at the dawn of this era of artificial intelligence (AI), EVs, batteries and autonomous cars — really becomes our strategy, it will not make America great again. But it will definitely help make China great again.Indeed, when Trump declared in his inaugural address that he planned to propel Americans to Mars, the first vision that popped into my head was of a US astronaut landing on the red planet and being met there by a Chinese astronaut, asking, “What took you so long?”Hey, Friedman, why do you keep comparing America and China?It’s certainly not because I would prefer to live there or have its problems, which are many and deep, particularly in banking. No, it’s because, despite its problems, China still knows how to make big stuff — often with sheer force from the top down, usually buttressed by massive government support but also often by common-sense planning and, more often than we would like to believe from an authoritarian system, by creative innovation.China is also not so silly as to treat one form of electricity generation as more conservative, liberal or Maoist than another. In the end, the outputs are all just electrons. They have no politics. All Beijing cares about is which is most abundant, efficient, cheap and clean.I was struck by the “coincidence” that on the day of Trump’s inaugural, where he boasted that “America will soon be greater, stronger and far more exceptional than ever before”, the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek unveiled its newest flagship AI model, R1, which demonstrated a new level of reasoning power — power that it was able to achieve with a smarter algorithm and without importing the most advanced US chips that we have placed restrictions on China from acquiring. You can get more AI juice either by getting a bigger orange (more neural networks and data) or by squeezing a smaller orange tighter with a smarter algorithm. That is what DeepSeek has reportedly done.As an article in Business Insider described it, “DeepSeek says R1 achieves ‘performance comparable to OpenAI o1 across math, code and reasoning tasks’,” and it quoted Theo Browne, a software developer behind a popular YouTube channel, as saying, “The new DeepSeek R1 model is incredible.” medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/NlKvwAielgw?si=HcSy9Qel-7ToWpQ4So, what does that have to do with energy policy?Because everything today is connected — which is exactly what Trump and his right-wing wokesters don’t understand.The faster AI improves, the more efficient and smarter autonomous electric vehicles will become. But the more AI improves, the more energy it will require. The more energy it requires, the more we want it to be renewable, so as not to exacerbate climate change. The more renewable it is, the more AI that America can generate and the more efficient our electric batteries become. The more efficient our batteries become, the more things they can power, from cars to homes to factories — and the more competitive our auto companies become in a world where the future of mobility is going to be largely hybrid-electric, all-electric and autonomous vehicles.In other words, in the 21st century the country that has the smartest, cheapest and most efficient ecosystem of AI, EVs, smart batteries and abundant clean electricity will dominate. Just as in the Industrial Age whoever had the biggest ecosystem of coal, steel, oil and combustion engines dominated.It’s the ecosystem, stupid. And if you pluck out one part of it for brain-dead, knee-jerk, right-wing woke political reasons, you lose.I confess, I have family in San Francisco, and every time I visit, I use only Waymo, Google’s self-driving taxis. I love to see them roll up to the kerb to pick me up, my initials flashing on the top; I get in the back seat, select one of the music channels playing my favourite hits and then get out at my destination — no fuss, no muss — because no human is driving.But the thing about autonomous cars — and, coming soon, autonomous buses and long-haul trucks — is that they must be all-electric and satellite-connected. Electric motors can change the amount of power they apply to turn the wheels instantaneously, in a small fraction of the time that it takes to accelerate in a petrol-powered car. The far faster reaction time of an electric car in response to an autonomous driving computer is essential so you don’t kill people. medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/95kcrgRhvK8?si=72CHu6RBDQD22ueMRemember, these cars are just smartphones, smart robots and smart batteries on wheels. So, it’s not surprising that some of China’s most popular EVs are made by Xiaomi and Huawei, both smartphone companies, and BYD, the battery company. China’s companies see themselves as building digital transportation devices, not just cars. The whole audio and video driving experience feels different. Too many US auto companies are still building cars that connect with your phone — and that’s it. (One of the most fateful industrial decisions made in America was when Apple and Google decided not to make cars.)BYD, the world’s fastest-growing automaker, is pouring $14bn into autonomous driving technology, as NYT’s Beijing bureau chief, Keith Bradsher, reported last year. BYD decided that autonomous driving was the future and has jumped in with thousands of engineers. Meanwhile, GM shut down Cruise, its autonomous taxi project, and put money into share buybacks. Talk about how to mortgage your future.Of course, the most ideal EV is one that is powered by renewable energy — wind, solar, wave, hydro or nuclear. Then you are really riding clean. China is not fully there yet. But China’s energy approach is what Joe Biden, Barack Obama and George W Bush opted for: all of the above.Yes, let’s exploit our oil and gas advantage: Under Biden, America pumped more oil in 2023 than any other country in the history of the world. But he also said that while we are exploiting our fossil fuel advantage, let’s double down on wind and solar, hydrogen, fusion and nuclear — and EVs — so we can own the mobility-AI-battery-autonomy ecosystem that will be the engine of so many innovations in the 21st century.And then along came Trump.He immediately declared a “national energy emergency” — because the leaders of American AI companies told him, correctly, that they are not going to have enough power to run their energy-devouring data centres. medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/A_ZALNTcZ5E?si=frFDmlC337QJoMhUAnd how did Trump propose to address the emergency he declared? By doubling down on fossil fuels, coupled with freezing Biden-era government incentives for wind energy, putting in doubt incentives for solar and boasting of building huge, electricity-guzzling data centres for AI.That’s not an ecosystem. That’s a right-wing woke energy mess.Hello? Wind and solar together today provide more than 14% of the country’s electricity generation.I can’t better describe how foolish this is than how my NYT newsroom colleagues wrote about it last week: “Trump declared that the US is facing an energy emergency, yet wants to block thousands of megawatts of planned wind projects that could power homes and businesses. He talks about strengthening American manufacturing but plans to withdraw assistance from the electric vehicle industry, which has invested billions of dollars in new factories across the US.”As Carl Pope, a former chair of the Sierra Club and the author, with Michael Bloomberg, of Climate of Hope, put it, “It’s like ringing a fire alarm and then laying off the fire department.”Moreover, Pope told me, if we choke off the growth of the US wind industry while electricity demand is soaring, we may well have to recommission mothballed coal plants, “which would be hugely expensive”, not to mention carbon polluting.It is just the opposite of common sense. Indeed, it makes no sense. China has to be loving it — because its leaders know just how much it will weaken America as a competitor in the industrial ecosystem of the future: AI, autonomous vehicles, batteries and clean power.As an analysis on the climate research site Carbon Brief noted last year, China made a huge surge in clean-energy investment in 2023 — “in particular, the so-called ‘new three’ industries of solar power, EVs and batteries”. In 2023 “clean-energy investment in China rose 40% year-on-year” to $890bn, an investment that “is almost as large as total global investments in fossil fuel supply in 2023”.No question: If Trump stays on this course, he will definitely make America more “exceptional” than ever — just not in the way he meant it.