Political Moments and Political Limits
On FT, NYC, LA, and BYD
Where are things? I’m writing this on the 19th of June in Washington, DC. The United States may or may not directly attack Iran, which Israel has already done. The people of Palestine continue to suffer. Stephen Miller pushed a 3000 person quota on deportations. The Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s restrictions on gender affirming care. Resistance to Trump’s authoritarian actions is everywhere: in the street, by politicians, by major institutions like Harvard, and in courts. Yet the political system at this point can only be described as sliding towards dictatorship.
This post represents an effort to listen to my own advice and tries to pay most attention to the issues that I follow. As I put it on Day 3 of Trump 2.0:
So, my basic advice is to not just let it all wash over you but — if you can and to the extent that you can, remembering that it’s January 2025 — to stare at the ones most deeply felt in your space and continue to sound the alarm about them, while acknowledging that others have different lives and different perspectives. Give them solidarity and try not to compete about which is the greater harm (I realize this is difficult untraining for a policy debater).
That being said, even in the set of areas I cover, there’s a lot going on. This post will just scratch the surface of analysis across a range of topics rather than present a deep dive into any one of them. Think of it as some hors d’oeuvres to tide you over until the main dishes arrive.
Coal
The FT ran a long story about coal with what I think was an unfortunately pessimistic framing.
I wrote a long thread on Bluesky here laying out my main issues with the piece.
There’s lots of data and quotes from the right sources — the IEA, the China energy analysis David Fishman, the China Climate Hub’s Li Shuo, and others. As ever, this story about the world is largely about China, which represents about half of global coal demand. But, strangely, the piece is more about the past than the future.
Ten years ago, there was a brief moment where many saw China, and hence the world, turning to post-coal growth. That period (2013-2016) turns out to have been a false turning point, and global/China’s demand for coal grew again as the economy turned back to investment and real estate in the late 2010s before the COVID shock and the three red lines and so on. And so the piece decries our failure before really analyzing trends going forward.
“No sign of peaking” is strange language to use when the IEA among others see a global peak this decade, when 65% of countries that use coal for power have seen there coal burning decline, when some countries have completely eliminated coal from their power mix, and when China is in the midst of building out massive renewable resources that have already reduced coal’s share of power generation and promise to displace more and more each year.
Indeed, the piece ends noting that China’s coal usage for electricity has been down in 2025 compared with 2024, which was true for each month of the year until May, which saw a 1% increase because of hydropower shortfalls (an increasingly common occurrence that likely connects back to climate impacts). Whether 2025 sees coal power decline in China remains up in the air, as hydro could again disappoint, wind is always a bit fickle, and the implications of China’s shift in renewable electricity pricing that started on June 1st will slow down deployments in the second half of the year. That all being said, as I summarized:
How do you think about a plateau? One could be disappointed that it didn’t happen a decade ago or that it isn’t the reversal we need to stay under 1.5C. Or one could think that turning the corner is one of the hardest parts, and now that we’re reversing the pace might pick up. I tend towards the latter. Maybe China will triple down on coal again in 2026 and make a fool of this prediction, but there’s a terrawatt of solar panel manufacturing capacity in China pumping out fusion energy collectors every day. There’s a lot of this planet that receives immense amounts of sun, and every month we’re seeing 50 GW or more of solar panels installed around the world. The idea that coal with all of its smoke and carbon is going to remain energy royalty feels ridiculous. I’m ready to see old king coal’s shattered visage buried deep in the sands.
NYC
It’s a shame that it took this long for Brad Lander to finally make waves in the NYC Mayor’s race. But putting his body in the way of ICE thugs illegally detaining New Yorkers is brave and worthy of the attention and praise that he received.
It’s also a shame that the NYT decided to go after the whole slate of candidates, especially Zohran Mamdani. The editorial board surely thought that they prefer Cuomo to Mamdani, are scared to say that, and are certainly too scared to say the opposite, so they punted. Ezra Klein did better, offering a full-throated column of support that Lander can lean on. He’s running third in the polling, but things move quickly. The cross-endorsement that Lander and Mamdani announced last week could be the key to pushing one of them over the Cuomo mountain. You can say it’s been a rollercoaster for Lander.
Los Angeles
It is good that we haven’t seen the US military open fire on Americans protesting Trump’s overreach. That such a statement needs to be said indicates how far we have fallen. A similar situation unfolded this spring when DOGE was sprinting around DC from government building to government building, and “I still have a job” was a text message that needed to be sent. Things that had felt solid melted into air. I used the escalating situation in LA as the way to open a recent piece on Trump’s abuse of emergency for Good Authority.
The people of Los Angeles and other cities are protesting the Trump administration’s aggressive wave of ICE raids. And the administration is raising the stakes by militarizing its attempt to crack down on protesters. This escalatory spiral highlights a principal tactic of the administration – a reliance on declaring an emergency.
Much of the policy action in Trump’s presidency to date has taken place through executive orders. The legal basis and authority of these orders has frequently rested on the concept of emergency powers, and the claim that the White House must address an urgent threat.
Go read the whole thing. True ChinaLab heads will realize that the emergency story connects with the surprising complication of coal rising alongside solar in PJM and MISO that I wrote about in my previous post here.
Political Limits of Bans on Chinese EVs
Americans often complain with the following, very telling phrase: why can’t we have nice things? That phrase was the title of Ezra Klein’s recent appearance on Jon Stewart’s show and of the first episode of writer and former Demos president Heather McGhee’s podcast. We say it a lot. And there’s a related meme.
The nice things we can’t have are items like universal health care, great transit, and walkable cities. Not items at all really but the products of systems. Americans are used to not having these systems in place despite the reality that other societies that aren’t as rich as ours building and sustaining them. Americans simply shrug and lament.
We’re at the beginning of Americans complaining about not having another nice thing: Chinese EVs. Unlike those complicated and integrated products of systems, this is a consumer product. Here’s two of my favorite people in my demographic (white American cis dudes in our 40s), Chris Hayes and Joe Weisenthal, letting loose as only happens about 50 minutes into a podcast:
Chris Hayes: … And the reason I’m thinking about this is when I think about like China’s BYD electric cars.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And I like look at them, I’m like I want to buy one of those.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, me too.
Chris Hayes: They have dope ass electric cars for like $20,000.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And you can’t get them as an American.
Joe Weisenthal: No, it’s crazy too. And I do think like the more I think about it, the more angry I feel about that. Like, I’m an American, I should be able to buy the best car in the world. Like it does not, that feels very wrong, and it feels like kind of ahistorical, not ahistorical in a --
Chris Hayes: I agree.
Joe Weisenthal: -- judgment in way, but in a way that feels like it’s an unusual moment in American society.
Chris Hayes: Why are you telling me I can’t buy a BYD?
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, that there’s a car that exists that’s better than anything on the market and I’m not allowed to like purchase it is like really strange.
So, let me suggest that there are political limits to banning Chinese EVs. How do they know about Chinese EVs being cheap and great? Well, information wants to be free. Here’s American streamer iShowSpeed visiting China and driving luxury cars.
Reddit posts like “This Chinese car looks cool” are also out there. For goodness sake, the Wall Street Journal wrote about Ford’s CEO Jim Farley bringing back Chinese EVs to drive around the US and feeling shook by the experience.
This topic is deserving of its own post or to connect it back to issues of industrial policy and process innovation, but I just needed to get this off my chest.