"Be a Good Ancestor"

China made solar panels cheap. Now it’s doing the same for electric buses. - Vox:

The rapidly growing megacity of Shenzhen, China, was choked with diesel pollution in the early 2010s. Though buses were just 0.5 percent of the city’s vehicles, they were responsible for 20 percent of the air pollution. So, as the World Resources Institute recounts, Shenzhen electrified them. All 16,359 of them.

It got there through some cleverness — they planned out charging infrastructure and pushed manufacturers to offer lifetime warranties on batteries — but mainly through government subsidies, which covered up to half the upfront cost of the vehicles.

In 2013, China was bopping along with 1,700 BEBs. ...it realized that its rapidly expanding urbanization could not continue to rely on diesel buses, lest it make an already crippling air-pollution problem even worse.

So it decided to make electric buses a thing. How? By dumping a giant pile of money on the problem, subsidizing the purchase of more than 350,000 BEBs in the following four years.

Other cities are beginning to get on the BEB bandwagon as well.

[BNEF writes that] “Paris aims to electrify all of its 4,500 buses by 2025, Copenhagen has committed to procure only zero-emission buses from 2019, and Los Angeles has the same target for its fleet of 2,200 buses by 2030.”

sometimes problems are big and urgent, you need scaled-up solutions quickly, and you just don’t have time to mess around. China didn’t nudge its solar industry, it kicked it in the pants. Now it’s doing the same to the BEB industry.

As economists will rush to point out, there have been enormous inefficiencies and waste along the way, money lost on graft or junk technology. Solar has often been poorly installed or curtailed. According to BNEF, some 43 percent of the BEBs allegedly produced in China in 2015 were basically fraudulent.

[China] rightly recognized that the problems (coal and diesel pollution) are intensely urgent and it’s not that huge a mystery how to solve them.

Amortized over the next 50 to 100 years, the next several generations of humanity, the cost of transition are a screaming deal at almost any price. It’s just a matter of learning (or perhaps relearning) to take a long-term view of human interests — to be a “good ancestor,” as they say.