EA ended up getting coopted by people who weren't interested in altruism at all but that doesn't seem like this.

China has industrial policy. The country and companies are able to invest in BEV technology knowing that everyone agrees on the direction.

They are testing for diligence just like exams in Confucian based systems.

You already know what the conclusion is going to be, the interesting part is how the author gets there.

The merchants of doubt ran out the clock and what I hear from the former deniers I know is that it is too expensive and too late to do anything now, being warmer will be nicer, and CO2 is a fertilizer.

To use a silicon valley analogy, nobody has figured out how to scale out mason bees. Not to the > 200sq miles of pomegranates, pistachios, and almonds owned by the Resnicks. The Resnicks funded some in-house research and apparently considred it a failure.

It's probably possible. Might not even be hard once you know the trick, but it's certainly not a slam-dunk.

I have relatives that do or have raised bees (as a hobby). Can bees suffer? I don't know. I kind of think a bee can experience suffering in a small degree. I'm not going to run the experiments on that because I'm not a sociopath. Also arguably the hive is the basic unit of the honeybee organism, not the bee itself.

I do know for certain hogs can suffer. I'm a farm boy from Iowa. I've been around them from a young age and I hate everything about them. I hate the smell, I hate the way their meat tastes to me like they smell, I hate how if you are small enough and don't take care, they are mean enough to knock you down and eat you.

I'm probably one of the few people on HN who have actually experienced in person what a hog confinement facility looks and smells and sounds like. I wouldn't wish it on my worst hog enemy. It is a vision of hell, illegal to film in Iowa, and in no way comparable to how we treat bee hives.

The billionaire Resinick pomegranate/pistachoi/almond oligarchs put quite a bit of effort into native bees which seemed quite successful but they shut it down I think about 5 years ago. I can't find the article now. Gen X+ might remember them as owners of the 'Franklin Mint' hawkers of knickknacks you either are or soon will be throwing into a dumpster.

They are BTW also largest renters of honeybee hives in the US.

If they were cars, most GA planes would qualify for 'antique' plates. Most of the rest are not technically antique, just antique technology.

Socialism with chinese characteristics/ Xi Jinpeng thought is the most successful ideology currently. Free speech/free markets power has decayed since people found ways to exploit them and more powerful people found ways to aid the exploiters.

The US is apparently powerless to exploit our own rare earth resources and fund/subsidize them or lithium production or photovoltaic production, nuclear reactors, or even semiconductor production.

By any measure that is weak.