Tesla Has Same Problem as Big Oil: Its Time Has Come

It must have seemed like a huge week for the fossil fuel industry: as the Wall Street Journal put it yesterday (and you could sense the headline writer’s glee), “The fossil fuel industry gets its revenge on green activists.”

The oil-and-gas industry is landing blow after blow against climate activists.
The Trump administration has cranked out approvals of major projects to ship liquefied natural gas from the Gulf Coast and killed a host of climate-related initiatives. Meanwhile, Texas billionaire Kelcy Warren has won a nearly $700 million verdict against Greenpeace that could spell the end of the group’s U.S. presence.

Hell, the Trump administration is trying to resurrect coal, and in what’s doubtless considered a back-slapping prank around the West Wing it just named a fracking executive to run the Department of Energy’s renewables office. Meanwhile, Musk’s vandals fired the quite brilliant chief scientist at NASA, doubtless because her work involved protecting the planet’s climate—Katherine Calvin was, among other things, the head of Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, so good sport to Jackie Robinson her.

All of this is deeply stupid and damaging. And yet, despite all that, there must have been a few shivers that ran down the spines of both Elon Musk and oil executives last week when they read a piece of news from China.

Here’s the story, as told by Bloomberg. Chinese automaker BYD (their slogan, at least in English, is ‘Build Your Dreams”) announced on Tuesday that its new cars—available in April for $30,000 if you’re in a place where you can buy one—will recharge in five minutes. Or, roughly, the time it takes to fill your tank with gasoline.

From “more features for no more price” and “smart driving for all,” BYD can now add “charging as fast as refueling” to its marketing slogans, potentially helping it to capture more share from legacy automakers and more direct rivals like Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc.

How did they do this? Here are a bunch of words I don’t fully understand:

BYD cites its “all liquid-cooled megawatt flash charging terminal system.”
In addition, to match the ultra-high power charging, BYD has self-developed a next-generation automotive-grade silicon carbide power chip. The chip has a voltage rating of up to 1500V, the highest to date in the car industry.
In tandem, BYD on Monday launched its flash-charging battery. From the positive to the negative electrode, the cell contains ultra-fast ion channels, which BYD says reduces the battery’s internal resistance by 50%.
There’s also a mass-produced 30,000 RPM motor. Luo Hongbin, BYD senior vice president, said the motor “not only significantly boosts a vehicle’s speed, but also greatly reduces the motor’s weight and size, enhancing power density.”

But I can translate it into English. BYD did not waste its time giving Nazi salutes. It didn’t buy a social media platform so it could make obscure marijuana jokes and make fun of poor people. It didn’t devote itself to helping a nincompoop win the presidency and then decide it would be exhilarating fun to fire a bunch of government workers. Instead, BYD did, you know, engineering.

It’s gotten so bad that even true believers like Dan Ives, one of Tesla’s biggest shareholders, have suggested Musk might want to go back to, you know, work.

It must sting for Musk to watch that kind of progress, especially on a week when he had to recall all 46,000 cybertrucks (and thus disclose for the first time that he’d only sold 46,000 cybertrucks) in order to keep them from dropping parts on the road. It turns out they’d stuck the trim on the plug-ugly things with the wrong glue—now they’re going to replace it with an adhesive that is “not prone to environmental embrittlement.” When owners drive their sad vehicles back to the dealers for repairs (not during a rainstorm, because that apparently causes rusting), they’ll likely encounter one of the hundreds of protests that have broken out across the country. (I confess to being quite proud of my sign at our local demonstration last Saturday)

It’s gotten so bad that even true believers like Dan Ives, one of Tesla’s biggest shareholders, have suggested Musk might want to go back to, you know, work. I mean, Musk has cut the value of his company in half in the last couple of months. But never fear—last night he assembled the company’s workers for a pep talk. Robo-taxis coming soon! As they have been since 2016!

But if the BYD announcement was a reminder that Musk is a poseur, the deeper threat probably comes for Big Oil. Because if you can put 400 kilometers worth of juice in a car in five minutes, the last even slightly good reason for buying an internal combustion vehicle vanishes. Yeah, you still need a fast charger—and BYD is building 4,000 of them across China. But it feels like writing on the wall: Chinese demand for gasoline dropped in 2024, and analysts see it going down almost five percent a year between now and 2030. As the International Energy Agency explained last week,

Electric vehicles currently account for about half of car sales in China, undercutting 3.5% of new fuel demand in 2024... China has been providing subsidy support to purchases of so-called “new energy vehicles” (NEVs) since 2009, promoting its automotive manufacturing industry, and reducing air pollution. A trade-in policy, introduced in April 2024 and expanded in 2025, continues to drive growth in China’s EV sales. Meanwhile, highly competitive Chinese automakers are also making gains in international markets.

America’s oil companies decided they could make more money from fossil fuel than from embracing renewables—they’ve decided to let the Chinese win the solar energy battle, reckoning that they can use their political power to keep the world hooked on hydrocarbons. In some ways it’s working—they helped buy Trump his presidency and he’s giving them what they want. In particular, he’s been shaking down foreign countries to buy more of their Liquefied Natural Gas to avoid tariffs.

But oil is a global commodity, and the perfect example of marginal pricing. If China is going to be using less gasoline—well, the price of oil is going to drop. That’s bad news for American producers—as Trump’s biggest industry fundraiser Harold Hamm explained

U.S. shale needs much higher oil prices than $50 per barrel, and even higher than the current WTI Crude price in the high $60s, for a “drill, baby, drill” boom, oil tycoon and Trump campaign donor Harold Hamm told Bloomberg last week.
“There are a lot of fields that are getting to the point that’s real tough to keep that cost of supply down,” Hamm told Bloomberg Television in an interview.

The fracking revolution is wearing down—wells are sputtering towards empty faster than expected, and if prices are depressed it will make less economic sense to drill baby drill, no matter what our new king demands. As David Wethe and Alix Steel reported his week

Shale operators are slowing production growth after years of drilling up their best locations. At this week’s CERAWeek by S&P Global energy conference in Houston, executives for some of the largest US shale companies forecast US oil production will peak in the next three to five years.

I’m beginning to think you can imagine a world where the U.S. builds tariff walls around its borders, prevents the easy development and spread of technology like EVs and heat pumps, and manages to become an island of internal combustion on an increasingly electrified world. That’s a depressing vision, though nowhere near as depressing as the U.S. imposing that vision on the rest of the world, something that’s going to get harder: if you were any other country (Canada, say) would you tie yourself to the U.S. for any critical product? If you had a choice? And everyone has a choice, because the sun shines and the wind blows everywhere. As the economists at IEEFA said this week, even the expensive “just energy transition partnerships” with emerging Asian nations may survive Trump’s desertion.

Given the current U.S. administration’s priorities and ambitions to “drill, baby, drill” for oil and gas, the withdrawal from JETP can be viewed as favorable for the energy transition. The program’s complexities and transformative potential demand the involvement of a “coalition of the willing.” The original countries (including the European Union), private sector partners, and philanthropies still support JETP and want to realize the mechanism’s potential. In the case of Indonesia, Germany has quickly stepped in to fill the U.S.’s vacated leadership role. Japan has reaffirmed its co-leadership role and remains committed to Indonesia’s USD20 billion JETP. Despite the U.S. exit, critical financing and support for the program remains.

Here’s a great interactive map from the New York Times of what the solar and wind boom looks like from outer space. It shows the burst of development in China—but also Turkey. And it doesn’t even capture the small-scale home by home and factory by factory spread of solar that seems to be speeding up exponentially over the last year.

It may even be hard to stomp out all this goodness here at home. Case in point: the Utah (!) legislature this week became the first in the country to (unanimously!) pass a law enabling “balcony solar,” the small-scale arrays that brought solar power to a million and a half German apartments last year.

The legislation exempts these systems from several requirements:

• No technical interconnection requirements.
• No technical interconnection agreement.
• Utilities cannot mandate approval, charge fees, or require additional controls or equipment beyond what is integrated into the system.

Plug and play, baby!

Indeed, if you want a sign for the future, here’s one: Chinese authorities are pulling back on a plan to let BYD build a new car plant in Mexico. Why? Because they’re afraid that people like Musk—an unimaginative pol, not an engineering genius—will steal their cool new tech.

Those respective authorities in China fear that BYD’s advanced (and in many cases, leading) technology could more easily end up in the possession of US competitors through Mexico, as the US neighbors to the south would gain unrestricted access to the Chinese automaker’s technology and production practices. Those powers went as far as to suggest that Mexico could even assist the US in gaining access to BYD’s technology.

It’s bad news for America that our country has lost its technological edge. It may be good news for the planet, though.