askchapo

Very on-brand take for Hexbear, but I think that as the barriers with fossil fuels get more and more pronounced, America is gonna get caught flat-footed here. There’s been a denial of the importance of building out renewable and battery infrastructure, so when the shit hits the fan America is gonna be stuck between a rock and a hard place where either they buy whatever China is willing to sell them, which I’m sure will be pricey, or be reliant on the Western tech that’s scrambling to catch up and ergo will be less plentiful and reliant. The former also means the profits aren’t staying with the US tech kleptocracy. That’s obviously not a problem for most Americans, but it does set up a class conflict between the majority that want the good Chinese battery and renewable tech and the oligarchs that want to kneecap the country to protect their revenue flows.

Thinking more globally, whenever there’s a big tech advancement we always see certain regions experiencing a “leap frog” effect where they adopt the new tech despite the prior iteration of that tech never having reached critical mass there. The classic example is landline phone infrastructure in subsaharan Africa never getting built out much, so cell phones with their relatively simple tower array infrastructure leap frogged landlines. So we may see areas that never had much in the way of personal internal combustion engine vehicles getting both dispersed renewable energy sources and EV’s to plug into those sources bypassing expensive gasoline, thus those EV’s become their first widely adopted automobiles.