Told you so; “the grid can’t handle electric cars so I guess you’ll have to do without cars in the future”. Electric car transition is in fact a way for them to take our cars away, it was never about giving us electric cars, which I figured when I observed that they are not building new nuclear power plants to energetically finance the new anticipated power expenditures from electric cars. The wind and solar power is all a fraud – it’s intermittent, dirty and weak, and the only truly good sources are nuclear, hydroelectric and geothermal. The problem with “green” advocates is that they want to transition everything to electricity “because it’s cleaner” and then they want to ban most sources of electricity, except the “feel good” stuff that actually creates availability and quality issues, not to mention toxic waste, because solar and wind don’t produce electricity from sun and wind, they produce electricity from environmentally toxic hardware that eventually has to be disposed somewhere.
Basically, it’s not about “green” anything, it’s about destroying the underlying assumptions of a technological civilization, which would result in more dead than a nuclear war, and if you think the WEF people don’t know that, you have a surprise coming. The entire thing looks like somebody’s long-term depopulation project, considering how they seem to be undermining the moral and intellectual basis of society, energy, agriculture, manufacturing and finances all at the same time. It’s a full-spectrum degradation. Russia is the only major country that has a sustainable economic structure at the moment, which was actually helped by the sanctions, which is an incredible irony; they have independent energetics, petrochemical industry that produces fertilizers, agriculture, heavy industry capable of producing machinery, they have all the raw materials they would ever need, they have educated people to work on solving actual problems, and they have the morality and worldview to back a healthy society. Basically, the only places where Russia needs to improve things is semiconductor lithography in the single-digit nanometer scale and, possibly, some other specialized areas such as optics, which is more-less trivial and seems to be in the process; what’s actually hard to do is educate scientists and create a morally and intellectually healthy society with a free market economy that incentivizes innovation and progress; technology follows easily.
It needs to be said though that this is American problem, and likewise the problem of countries that America controls. It’s not like there are no countries that are increasing electricity generation. Electric vehicles reduce dependency on oil imports so it makes perfect sense for some countries to promote them.
I don’t understand “independent economy” argument. It basically means that if you’re a CEO of Microsoft you’re in a worse position than a peasant, because a peasant is more independent. Peasants can survive without Windows, whereas a Microsoft CEO would need to start growing his own food, making his own clothes and so on. It’s not like Singaporeans are economically worse off than Ugandans just because Singapore is almost completely dependent on food imports. China was a net oil exporter until the early 90s, which means it was more independent. That does not mean the Chinese economy was better then than it is now when it exports and imports more. The goal of the economy is wealth. Economic independence is just one of the many factors that need to be balanced and optimized in order to increase wealth as much as possible. Economic independence is valuable if it increases wealth, and harmful if it decreases it. It’s something that’s good to have in order to increase resistance to political pressure and to avoid wartime disruption. These too need to be balanced in order to increase wealth. Otherwise, everyone should’ve used North Korea as a role model. It has been more economically independent than Russia.
It’s the same thing with military. The goal isn’t to have as many soldiers and equipment as possible because that would come at the expense of everything else. The goal is to optimize in order to discourage (potential) enemies and thus to prevent war, and if war breaks out to have good enough military to win it. China and Russia used to station a lot of troops along their border. That border has been demilitarized for the past few decades. That does not mean their military is now weaker, or that they are now strategically worse off, just because they depend on trust. Russia can focus almost entirely on its western border, which makes it militarily more powerful where it matters instead of having its military all over the place. For China, such arrangement means that it can not only reduce the number of troops but also change the composition of its military. The main battle tank, for example, becomes almost useless, as Chinese southern border and high-altitude border with India are only suitable for light tanks.
Economic independence vs. wealth looks like one of those dichotomies that appear valid until you really inspect the issue, like for instance gold vs. “interest bearing assets”. Sure, it’s better to be wealthy than independent in “peacetime” circumstances, where you can earn money doing one thing and buy everything you need internationally, but that’s what Russia has been doing since 1990 or so and it was almost fatal, they barely survived it. Being self-sufficient in their situation means not being a colony that produces raw materials (that get to be artificially depreciated by your enemies that control the market) and buys overpriced finished products, thus feeding everybody else’s economy but your own. Basically, the profit gets to be earned by your people and not foreign companies.
Also, as we had the opportunity to find out recently, every single part of the economy where one is not self-sufficient is a target for “sanctions”, or, in less newspeak terms, economic warfare.
China appears to be wealthier than Russia at the moment, but this might be deceptive, as its wealth is for the most part result of manufacturing for the Western markets, and if those markets collapse (as they inevitably will, since they are going bankrupt), China will find itself in problems much greater than Russia’s. I know it sounds crazy to talk about China going bankrupt, but Japan used to be a country with extreme excess of wealth, and now they are basically bankrupt, so it’s not unheard of.
That’s circumstantial. Since Russia has more natural resources than it consumes, them increasing independence makes perfect sense because their initial position was far from optimal. They had high enough population (including a lot of scientists), large enough territory, enough know-how and so on, and their problem was that they became too dependent when they didn’t need to be. Of course it makes sense for Russia to develop critically important sectors because the math is such that less independence would result in less overall economic wealth, due to current international situation.
That same approach is going to be vastly inefficient for a lot of other countries, to the point they would be either crippled or would completely collapse. Singapore simply can’t simultaneously focus on independence in agriculture, military industry, space industry, can’t design and produce its own airplanes, semiconductors, and so on. The math here is completely different.
Japan didn’t go bankrupt on its own. It shot itself in the foot, on American order. It was catching up to the US in terms of GDP, despite having much smaller population. It was forced to sign Plaza Accord and whatever else, and that was that. Japanese semiconductor industry was directly destroyed by the US. The math here is simple: Japan is bankrupt because it has zero economic independence, being an occupied country. It cannot be otherwise.
China on the other hand is an independent country, which completely changes the math. Maybe it would go bankrupt in a hundred years, but it’s not going to any time soon (not counting scenarios such as nuclear war, asteroid etc). “The Chinese economy looks a lot different today from how it did in the past. Since the pandemic, China has pivoted its export base away from the wealthy economies to the poorer developing ones. Between 2019 and 2022 Chinese exports to developing economies almost doubled, and now rival its exports to developed economies. (..) China has managed to diversify its economy in such a way that it seems unthreatened by a recession in the developed world. That is a remarkable achievement, but it could also have political and economic consequences among the most economically comfortable countries. For one, Chinese prosperity no longer requires exports to the West. China has, for all intents and purposes, become a truly independent growth model.” (UnHerd article) So what we had was partial economic dependence of China on the Western market for optimal economic growth, and then timely switch to other markets in order to, again, optimize growth and reduce risks. Partial economic dependence on oil from foreign countries to, again, optimize growth, instead of capping growth at the level of domestic oil production which would make no sense. At the same time, timely transition from oil to other sources of energy, following technological progress, in order to increase independence. Also at the same time, diversifying supply in order to avoid being cut off during wartime. So although China is today partly dependent on oil/gas imports, it is virtually independent because it has pipelines to Russia, pipelines to central Asian republics, oil tankers, CPEC corridor through Pakistan to bypass the Strait of Malacca, and a pipeline to the port in Myanmar. Of course, ideally China would be able to conjure oil out of thin air, or would ideally have a lot of it like Russia. But, given the circumstances, the approach is optimal. A ship that uses sails and oars will do better than a ship which only uses oars because it doesn’t want to depend on the wind, despite the fact that sometimes there is no wind. Likewise, ships with helmsmen will do better than ships without them, regardless of the possibility of some helmsman having no clue what to do. Just one more thing to add – economic dependency goes both ways and is the main element of Chinese soft power. Countries that trade a lot with China are partly dependent on China. This is how China drew more and more countries into its sphere of influence, and out of American one. Because of this the Chinese international position is greatly strengthened. It’s not that China is weaker because of its exports – it’s actually much stronger in every way. Militarily (indirectly), diplomatically, economically, culturally. If Western markets disappear tomorrow, China will take over Western share in other countries – and march on.
Yes, China has several potential replacements for the West – Chinese middle class might in fact be more important, numerous and wealthier than the West; also, India, despite their troublesome relations; Africa and Latin America, and of course Russia. I think Russia and China complement each other quite nicely, because Russia has energy and raw materials, and China has mass-market products of the kind Russia lacks. Also, China has manufacturing capabilities that dwarf those of Russia, which might be of great importance in weapons production, and might explain Medvedev’s recent visit.
What I expect to happen is the continuation of the existing trend where the West has an idea about itself that is no longer matched by the actual reality, because of the gradual degradation that might become steeper as time goes by. We can see this with Europe, which makes demands and behaves as if it actually matters, and it’s borderline embarassing.