Tesla, Big Oil have a weakness in common

They're way behind the technological curve

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 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.

And heck, if we try we can make it happen here too. Don’t forget for a minute about Sun Day, coming for the weekend of September 20th and 21st. The sun of the week comes from one Jane Fonda, and it’s as beautiful as you’d imagine

Go make your own.

In other energy and climate news:

+Huge thanks to researchers like Gretchen Gehrke who are quickly downloading all the technical data on the government’s various climate and energy websites before Musk’s boys can vandalize it

In the past two months, hundreds of terabytes of digital resources analyzing data have been taken off government websites, and more are feared to be at risk of deletion. While in many cases the underlying data still exists, the tools that make it possible for the public and researchers to use that data have been removed.

But now, hundreds of volunteers are working to collect and download as much government data as possible and to recreate the digital tools that allow the public to access that information.

So far, volunteers working on a project called Public Environmental Data Partners have retrieved more than 100 data sets that were removed from government sites, and they have a growing list of 300 more they hope to preserve.

+The very rapid melt of the world’s glaciers is imperiling food and water supplies for two billion humans, a new UN report concludes

The rate of change of glaciers is the worst on record, according to separate research from the World Meteorological Organisation, which published its annual State of the Climate report this week. The largest three-year loss of glacier mass on record occurred in the past three years, the study found, with Norway, Sweden, Svalbard and the tropical Andes among the worst-affected areas.

Eastern Africa has lost 80% of its glaciers in places and, in the Andes, between a third and a half of glaciers have melted since 1998. Glaciers in the Alps and the Pyrenees, the worst affected in Europe, have shrunk by about 40% over roughly the same period.

The decline of glaciers has had a further impact, added Abou Amani, director of water sciences at Unesco, in that the loss of ice replaces a reflective surface with dark soil that absorbs heat. “Glaciers melting have an impact on the reflectivity of [solar] radiation and that will impact the whole climate system,” he warned.

While we’re dealing with dismal data, new numbers from NASA (compiled before its chief scientist was given the sack) show that sea level is now rising much faster, with 2024 setting global records

Global sea level rose faster than expected in 2024, mostly because of ocean water expanding as it warms, or thermal expansion. According to a NASA-led analysis, last year’s rate of rise was 0.23 inches (0.59 centimeters) per year, compared to the expected rate of 0.17 inches (0.43 centimeters) per year.

“The rise we saw in 2024 was higher than we expected,” said Josh Willis, a sea level researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Every year is a little bit different, but what’s clear is that the ocean continues to rise, and the rate of rise is getting faster and faster.”

+I alluded earlier to Greenpeace’s loss of a $700 million lawsuit from a pipeline company claiming that they were responsible for protests in the Dakotas. This is a terrifyingly big deal; it it’s upheld on appeal it will make it far more dangerous for anyone to protest anything. A donation to Greenpeace’s Warrior Defense Fund would be in order

+Here’s one I bet you never thought of. Global warming is apparently set to reduce the number of satellites that can safely orbit the earth

In a study published today in Nature Sustainability, the researchers reveal that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are causing the upper atmosphere to shrink. The thermosphere, a layer where the International Space Station and most satellites orbit, is of particular concern. When the thermosphere contracts, its density decreases, which reduces atmospheric drag—the force that typically pulls old satellites and space debris down to lower altitudes where they burn up upon re-entry.

With less drag, satellites and debris will remain in orbit longer, creating an overcrowded environment in critical regions and heightening the risk of collisions.

The team ran simulations to assess how carbon emissions impact the upper atmosphere and orbital dynamics, estimating the “satellite carrying capacity” of low Earth orbit. Their findings predict that by 2100, the capacity of popular orbital regions could decline by 50-66 percent due to the effects of greenhouse gases.

“Our behavior with greenhouse gases over the past century is affecting how we will operate satellites over the next century,” says Richard Linares, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro).

+Finally, huge thanks to the 450 Olympians from 90 countries and 50 sports who wrote an open letter to the next president of the International Olympic Committee, demanding that she put climate change at the heart of her work.

Rising temperatures and extreme weather are already disrupting competition schedules, putting iconic venues at risk and affecting the health of athletes and fans.

This year’s devastating wildfires in Los Angeles —host city of the 2028 Olympic Games—are a stark reminder of why bold action is needed. Extreme heat is raising real concerns about whether Summer Games can be held safely in future years, and Winter Games are becoming harder to organize with reliable snow and ice conditions diminishing annually.

This is no longer a distant threat, but a current and growing harm to the sports we love and to the countries that make up our Olympic family. As the incoming President you have a precious opportunity to build on the IOC’s sustainability leadership, keeping the spirit of the Games alive by ensuring that sport remains accessible and safe for future generations.

This includes: 1. Strengthening commitments to swiftly cut carbon emissions; 2. Championing sustainable practices in Host Cities; 3. Setting a standard regarding high polluting sponsorships; 4. Using the IOC’s platform to advocate for broader environmental action

In this ever-more-fractured world, the Olympics, imperfect as they are, remains one of the few forces pulling us together. Such thanks to the young people who see their chance to make a difference!

https://act.sierraclub.org/events/details?formcampaignid=701Po00000idLJQIA2&page=registered

https://ssir.org/articles/entry/crisis-philanthropy-field-building#

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/20/glacier-meltdown-risks-food-and-water-supply-of-2bn-people-says-un