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renewables
Tesla Has Same Problem as Big Oil: Its Time Has Come
In the end, despite major victories for the fossil fuel industry in recent days, Elon Musk's very bad week shows there's possibly a much brighter future ahead for the rest of us.
Mar 22, 2025
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.
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IEA Report Underscores Urgency of Fossil Fuel Phaseout as Electricity Demand Surges
"The world has the need and the capacity to go much faster."
Oct 16, 2024
The International Energy Agency on Wednesday released a major report showing that the world's nations are not on track to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with 2030 targets and doing so will be made more difficult by growing demand for electricity.
The 398-page report, World Energy Outlook (WEO) 2024, is the latest in the IEA's flagship annual series, which is heavily cited by stakeholders across the world.
The report found that while renewables are entering the energy mix at an "unprecedented" rate—a record 560 gigawatts came online globally in 2023—the world's nations are on track to reduce emissions only by 3% from 2023 levels by 2030, rather than the 33% needed to meet agreed-upon targets. It also finds that the path to net zero by 2050 is "increasingly narrow."
"The world has the need and the capacity to go much faster," the report says.
The challenges to decarbonization include an increase in demand in electricity, especially in China and India.
This year's WEO projects a 6% higher rate in global electricity demand by 2035 than did last year's, with the surge "driven by light industrial consumption, electric mobility, cooling, and data centers and [artificial intelligence]."
While renewable development and electrification generally help bend down the emissions curve, experts warn that renewables only do so if they replace fossil fuel use, and the electricity needs to be powered cleanly.
"What the WEO is showing is that a market-led approach is leading to renewable energy being added on top of fossil fuels, rather than driving a rapid transition away from them," Collin Rees, U.S. program manager at Oil Change International (OCI), told Common Dreams. "That's why we need more direct intervention to actually phase down the fossils and boost renewables to make up the difference."
The growth in electricity demand raises the bar for climate action. Dave Jones, a director at Ember, an energy think tank, toldThe New York Times that "with higher energy use, even fast renewables growth doesn't translate to fast falls in carbon dioxide emissions."
The new WEO projects coal to decline more gradually than had been previously expected due to the rising electricity demand. This is true not only in China and India but also the United States, thanks partly to the inordinate amounts of energy used by AI data centers.
"With established technology companies and AI startups making major investments, a sharp rise in electricity consumption by data centers looks inevitable," the WEO says.
Still, Fatih Birol, the IEA's executive director, celebrated the overall move toward electrification and drew attention to the WEO finding that solar and wind would power far more of the world's electricity by 2035.
Electricity's growing role in the energy mix makes it vital to ensure as much of it as possible is generated from clean sources
The rapid growth of solar & wind means they are both set to overtake power generation from coal by 2035
More in #WEO24 ➡️ https://t.co/SiR6lGAAPw pic.twitter.com/zkNeRtbkG7
— Fatih Birol (@fbirol) October 16, 2024
The key problem highlighted by the new WEO is the continued reliance on fossil fuels, according to an OCI statement: "The WEO lays bare how much work is left to do for governments to follow through with the policies and funding needed for a livable planet."
OCI calls for stop to all oil, gas, and coal extraction beyond existing fields and mines. The group also opposes liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects, which the IEA authors raised as a point of concern in the WEO.
The report says that "an unprecedented volume of LNG is due to come online in the second-half of the 2020s, led by a near-doubling of export capacity in the United States and Qatar."
The WEO authors project that a surplus of LNG will depress gas prices internationally, which could affect the uptake of renewables.
"Clean technology costs are coming down, but maintaining and accelerating momentum behind their deployment in a lower fuel-price world is a different proposition," they wrote.
Rees of OCI said the LNG glut could lead to "displacement of renewable solutions like wind, solar, and heat pumps" and condemned U.S. policymakers for pushing LNG exports "when there's no room for it in a livable climate, and no need for it even in scenarios far off track from climate safety."
Though the IEA's projections show that the world is not doing enough to tackle climate change, there is no guarantee that even the modest progress assumed in the projections will come to pass. Big Oil executives have cast doubt on the idea that fossil fuel use and climate emissions will peak by the end of the decade, as the IEA projects.
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'Major Power Milestone': US Green Groups Cheer Wind, Solar Overtaking Coal
"This historic milestone marks a significant win for clean energy advocates, for ratepayers, and for people and communities across the country," said one climate leader.
Aug 14, 2024
U.S. climate advocates this week are celebrating new federal data that show wind and solar have generated more power than coal during the first seven months of 2024 and are on track to do so for the entire calendar year.
"This is the kind of news we like to see!" Food & Water Watch said of the data on social media Tuesday. "Ensuring a livable climate for all depends on us making a swift and just transition to clean energy like wind and solar."'
The group shared reporting from E&E News, which noted that "the milestone had been long expected due to a steady stream of coal plant retirements and the rapid growth of wind and solar. Last year, wind and solar outpaced coal through May before the fossil fuel eventually overtook the pair when power demand surged in the summer."
"Renewables' growth has been driven by a surge in solar production over the last year," the news outlet continued. "The 118 terawatt-hours generated by utility-scale solar facilities through the end of July represented a 36% increase from the same time period last year, according to preliminary U.S. Energy Information Administration figures. Wind production was 275 TWh, up 8% over 2023 levels. Renewables' combined production of 393 TWh outpaced coal generation of 388 TWh."
Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous said in a statement Wednesday that "wind and solar energy has long been the most cost-effective choice for utilities, but now it has also outpaced coal generation as the top source of energy, further demonstrating that clean energy is critical to a reliable and affordable grid."
"This historic milestone marks a significant win for clean energy advocates, for ratepayers, and for people and communities across the country that simply want to breathe clean air, drink safe water, and worry less about climate disasters like floods and wildfires," Jealous continued.
"For decades, the Sierra Club has fought to move America Beyond Coal and onto a clean, reliable, and affordable grid," he added. "To date, the Beyond Coal campaign has secured the retirement of 385 coal plants and counting, and on August 16th, we celebrate the two-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, which made historic investments in clean energy and clean energy jobs. Together, families across the country are saving money, enjoying good paying jobs, breathing clean air, and drinking safe water."
Along with celebrating the federal legislation signed in 2022 by President Joe Biden, Sierra Club highlighted a state law signed the previous year by Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.
"Illinoisans should be proud of the work we've done to close our largest coal plants and leverage the power of clean energy to drive economic growth while reducing pollution that's harmful to public health and our planet," said Jack Darin, director of the Sierra Club's state chapter. "Thanks to the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act of 2021, Illinois workers are now building the clean energy that is replacing old, dirty fossil fuels and bringing a brighter future to communities across our state."
Celebrations over the "major power milestone" come as Americans prepare for a November presidential election in which Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz—who are endorsed by a range of climate groups—are set to face former Big Oil-backed former Republican President Donald Trump and U.S. Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).
During an April event in Florida, Trump told fossil fuel executives that if they invested just $1 billion into his campaign, he would gut the Biden-Harris administration's climate regulations. The Washington Postreported Tuesday that billionaire Continental Resources founder then "called other oil executives and encouraged them to attend fundraisers and open their wallets."
While Hamm is reportedly sharing Big Oil's priorities with the Trump-Vance team, their approach can be summed up by a phrase they've said on the campaign trail: "drill, baby, drill."
Although the Republican candidates have tried to distance themselves by the Heritage Foundation-led Project 2025, the right-wing policy agenda—crafted by many Trump allies—has also alarmed climate campaigners.
Noting the new energy data, Antonia Juhasz, a senior researcher on fossil fuels at Human Rights Watch, said Tuesday: "This transformation is due in large part to federal government policy which has specifically incentivized renewable energy development and deployment and increased regulation on the harms of fossil fuels. All of which are specifically targeted for removal in Project 2025."
As Common Dreamsreported earlier Wednesday, an analysis from the think tank Energy Innovation shows that a GOP administration implementing the Project 2025 plan would increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2.7 billion metric tons by 2030 compared to the current trajectory.
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