#Europe EV market

[techdriveplay]

What Percentage of Cars Sold in 2023 Were Electric?

The automotive industry has been rapidly shifting towards electric vehicles (EVs), driven by increasing environmental concerns, technological advancements, and government incentives. The year 2023 marked a significant milestone in this transition. This transition has raised the question: What Percentage of Cars Sold in 2023 Were Electric? Let’s dive into the data to understand the impact and…

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

EVs were supposed to be the future. Not everyone is buying it | DW News

P.S. Despite pledges and targets to move electric vehicles down the road, recent second quarter earnings from big car companies show loses. Ford and Stellantis are both struggling, and a majority of car companies are losing money on each electric vehicle sold -- no matter if it's a battery or plug in. Will big auto makers step away from electric or simply diversify their portfolios(..)

P.S. Of course, not everyone will buy it! First look at the horrible price tag or miserable range performance of "affordable" EVs, then ask how you will charge your EV's battery on a daily basis and on a long trip, how much money you will spend repairing your EV, and how much legacy automakers support their EV buyers and charging networks.

If you study the behaviour of legacy automakers in the electric car market, it becomes obvious that there is a lot of noise and little substance in what legacy automakers do. Electric car buyers, especially mass market buyers, are NOT interested in buying badly overpriced low volume compliance EVs that can't be easily charged anywhere...

The market of rich EV enthusiasts and lovers of "green" ideas in Europe is already quite saturated with expensive electric cars and the salaries of Norwegians or Swedes are far from affordable for everyone...many Europeans cannot afford even the cheapest new ICE vehicle, so it is important to answer the question whether there will be it is possible to drive a lot and repair used and heavily used electric cars...

Non-Tesla EV charging networks are real pain in the ass...Right now, the correct term for non-Tesla EV buyers' concern is not "range anxiety" but a "charger anxiety"...

[head-post]

China investigates EU products in response to EV tariffs

China imposed temporary anti-dumping measures on goods from the European Union after the bloc voted in favour of tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles (EVs), according to Reuters.

China’s Ministry of Commerce said the dumping of brandy from the EU threatened China’s own brandy sector with “substantial damage.” As a result, Beijing hit EU brands including Hennessy and Remy Martin on Tuesday. France’s cognac lobby claimed the new duties were a retaliation to tariffs on EVs and called on authorities to protect the brandy industry.

An investigation into dairy subsidies announced by China’s Ministry of Commerce in August would focus on various types of cheese, milk and cream intended for human consumption. The measure was a response to a complaint filed on 29 July by the China Dairy Industry Association on behalf of the domestic dairy industry.

The EU was China’s second-largest source of dairy products, with 36 per cent of the total import value in 2023, according to Chinese customs data. The EU exported 1.7 billion euros ($1.84 billion) of dairy products to China in 2023, the European Commission reported.

Another anti-dumping investigation in June targeted pork. The ministry said it was prompted by a complaint filed by the China Animal Husbandry Association on behalf of the domestic pork industry.

Pork suppliers from South America, the US and Russia could be among those to gain market share if Beijing restricted imports from the EU. The EU accounts for more than half of China’s imports of pork worth about $6 billion in 2023, according to customs data.

Beijing launched an anti-dumping investigation in May against POM (Polyoxymethylene) copolymers imported from the EU, the US, Japan and Taiwan. This plastic is often used in wet engineering environments.

Read more HERE

[mohitbisresearch]

The Europe additives market for EV adhesives and sealants (excluding U.K.) was valued at $15.83 million in 2023, and it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 24.41% and reach $113.07 million by 2032.

[evehiclesaura]

Western Auto Giants Grapple with the Onslaught of Affordable Chinese EVs in Europe

As the saying goes, a new wave is sweeping through the automotive industry, and this time, it is electric. But there’s a new twist in the tale – the arrival of inexpensive Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) that has started to unsettle Western car manufacturers. This shifting landscape has particularly nudged France’s Renault to rethink its strategies and ultimately, declare a significant goal:…

[zvaigzdelasas]

You can’t buy the Seagull in the US. But I bet you wish you could.

A small hatchback around the size of a Mini Cooper, the Seagull is a fast-charging electric car and claims a range of up to 250 miles [...] BYD, its Chinese manufacturer, claims it can go from 30 percent to 80 percent charged in a half-hour using a DC plug. It’s hardly a luxury car but it’s well-equipped, with a power driver’s seat and cruise control. “If I were looking for an inexpensive commuter car … this would be perfect,” veteran car journalist John McElroy said after taking a drive.

The best part? Its base model costs about $10,700 in China.

That’s about a third of the cost of the cheapest EV you can buy in the US. In South America, it’s a little pricier, but still fairly affordable, at under $24,000 for a top-trim version. Even in Europe, you can get an entry-level BYD for under €30,000. These are absolutely screaming deals — exactly the kind of products that could turbocharge our transition away from gas and toward electric vehicles.[...]

The problem for Americans? The Biden administration is hell-bent on preventing you from buying BYD’s product, and if Donald Trump returns to office, he is likely to fight it as well.

That’s because the BYD cars are made in China, and both Biden and Trump are committed to an ultranationalist trade policy meant to keep BYD’s products out. [...] Shipments to Europe have increased astronomically; Chinese companies sold 0.5 percent of EVs in Europe in 2019 but they’re already over 9 percent as of last year. Companies like BYD make cheap, reasonably good-quality cars people are eager to buy.

In 2018, Trump imposed, and Biden has since continued, a special 25 percent tax on Chinese-made autos, on top of the ordinary 2.5 percent tax on foreign-made cars.

That has so far prevented BYD and its Chinese peers from trying to enter the US market. US customer tastes are different enough that Chinese manufacturers would probably prefer to make cars tailored to them — but US policy has been so hostile toward cheap Chinese EVs that so far, the companies haven’t wanted to bother.

So, the result is that we’re left out of the bounty of cheap EV options created by BYD and others. “If you’re a consumer right now, the best place to be right now is China, because you have the best choice of EVs,” Ilaria Mazzocco, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an expert on Chinese EVs, says.[...]

Still, China’s price advantage is big enough that even the extreme Trump-Biden import tax might not be enough to deter companies like BYD from entering the US market. Even with the tariffs, Chinese cars might be cheaper than their rivals. “​​Subsidies most likely won’t be enough; Mr. Biden will need to impose [more] trade restrictions,” climate journalist Robinson Meyer predicted recently. The Biden administration is already making noise about imposing even more draconian taxes or trade restrictions against these vehicles. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has described Chinese-made cars as a national security threat, and recently announced an investigation into the vehicles’ data collection abilities and the possibility they could send movement data to Beijing.

On the one hand, Biden is offering Americans up to $7,500 per vehicle to buy EVs (provided they meet certain made-in-North America rules). On the other hand, he’s imposing massive taxes to keep Americans from buying EVs. It’s a bizarre policy that makes no sense from a climate perspective.[...]

[The Biden Administration] has proven shockingly willing to sabotage its own climate policy if it gets to stick it to the Chinese in the process.

“There’s almost an across-the-board apprehension about Chinese EVs, even though they would make an important contribution to [lower] CO2 emissions,” Gary Clyde Hufbauer, a veteran trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, says.[...]

Realistically, Helveston argues, BYD might not sell something like the Seagull in the US because it’s smaller than most cars Americans buy. They’d probably build plants in the US instead, or its free-trade zone partners Canada and Mexico, to build vehicles tailored for Americans. “If you’re going to really enter a market, you have to make it locally,” Helveston explains. “US automakers like GM sell and make millions of cars in China to sell in China.” BYD would do the same. Indeed, it’s already reportedly scouting sites for factories in Mexico.

If they ever were to set up shop in North America, BYD and other Chinese car companies would still have a major price advantage versus American EVs. They have years more experience and a much more successful track record of building batteries and EVs at low cost.

“Part of why they’re so successful is they’ve been thinking outside the box on cost reduction for a long time,” Mazzocco says. They took the “opposite of the Tesla approach”: starting not with luxury vehicles but ultra-cheap cars fit for taxi fleets and not much else, and constantly improving their early inexpensive prototypes. The result is that Chinese firms have gotten extremely good at making inexpensive EVs, at a time when Ford, by contrast, lost $28,000 for every EV it sold in 2023.[...]

“If you have more affordable EVs in the United States, no matter where you come from,” Gopal says, “that’s better for the climate.”

Still, the Biden administration reportedly wants to restrict Chinese car companies’ access to the US even if they do set up shop in North America. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that the Biden administration is formulating rules that would limit US sales of Chinese-made parts, even if they’re in vehicles ultimately assembled in the US or Mexico.[...]

But the Biden administration’s objections to Chinese EVs are also ideological. The Biden administration represents the victory of a protectionist, trade-skeptical wing of the Democratic party that was relegated to the sidelines during the Clinton and Obama years.[...]

[O]ver 90 percent of American households have a car, and surging car prices were a huge contributor to the 2021–2023 rise in inflation.

Barriers to importing cheap cars make inflation worse and reduce the real incomes of the middle class.

Not only are the administration and other left-leaning institutions opposed to Chinese EVs, but hardline conservatives at places like the Heritage Foundation are calling for outright bans on Chinese EVs as well. Their rationale is security, another theme the Biden administration evokes often. On Thursday, the Commerce Department announced it was beginning a process to “investigate the national security risks of … PRC-manufactured technology in [internet-connected] vehicles.”

6 Mar 24

[fatehbaz]

In fact, far more Asian workers moved to the Americas in the 19th century to make sugar than to build the transcontinental railroad [...]. [T]housands of Chinese migrants were recruited to work [...] on Louisiana’s sugar plantations after the Civil War. [...] Recruited and reviled as "coolies," their presence in sugar production helped justify racial exclusion after the abolition of slavery.

In places where sugar cane is grown, such as Mauritius, Fiji, Hawaii, Guyana, Trinidad and Suriname, there is usually a sizable population of Asians who can trace their ancestry to India, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere. They are descendants of sugar plantation workers, whose migration and labor embodied the limitations and contradictions of chattel slavery’s slow death in the 19th century. [...]

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Mass consumption of sugar in industrializing Europe and North America rested on mass production of sugar by enslaved Africans in the colonies. The whip, the market, and the law institutionalized slavery across the Americas, including in the U.S. When the Haitian Revolution erupted in 1791 and Napoleon Bonaparte’s mission to reclaim Saint-Domingue, France’s most prized colony, failed, slaveholding regimes around the world grew alarmed. In response to a series of slave rebellions in its own sugar colonies, especially in Jamaica, the British Empire formally abolished slavery in the 1830s. British emancipation included a payment of £20 million to slave owners, an immense sum of money that British taxpayers made loan payments on until 2015.

Importing indentured labor from Asia emerged as a potential way to maintain the British Empire’s sugar plantation system.

In 1838 John Gladstone, father of future prime minister William E. Gladstone, arranged for the shipment of 396 South Asian workers, bound to five years of indentured labor, to his sugar estates in British Guiana. The experiment with “Gladstone coolies,” as those workers came to be known, inaugurated [...] “a new system of [...] [indentured servitude],” which would endure for nearly a century. [...]

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Bonaparte [...] agreed to sell France's claims [...] to the U.S. [...] in 1803, in [...] the Louisiana Purchase. Plantation owners who escaped Saint-Domingue [Haiti] with their enslaved workers helped establish a booming sugar industry in southern Louisiana. On huge plantations surrounding New Orleans, home of the largest slave market in the antebellum South, sugar production took off in the first half of the 19th century. By 1853, Louisiana was producing nearly 25% of all exportable sugar in the world. [...] On the eve of the Civil War, Louisiana’s sugar industry was valued at US$200 million. More than half of that figure represented the valuation of the ownership of human beings – Black people who did the backbreaking labor [...]. By the war’s end, approximately $193 million of the sugar industry’s prewar value had vanished.

Desperate to regain power and authority after the war, Louisiana’s wealthiest planters studied and learned from their Caribbean counterparts. They, too, looked to Asian workers for their salvation, fantasizing that so-called “coolies” [...].

Thousands of Chinese workers landed in Louisiana between 1866 and 1870, recruited from the Caribbean, China and California. Bound to multiyear contracts, they symbolized Louisiana planters’ racial hope [...].

To great fanfare, Louisiana’s wealthiest planters spent thousands of dollars to recruit gangs of Chinese workers. When 140 Chinese laborers arrived on Millaudon plantation near New Orleans on July 4, 1870, at a cost of about $10,000 in recruitment fees, the New Orleans Times reported that they were “young, athletic, intelligent, sober and cleanly” and superior to “the vast majority of our African population.” [...] But [...] [w]hen they heard that other workers earned more, they demanded the same. When planters refused, they ran away. The Chinese recruits, the Planters’ Banner observed in 1871, were “fond of changing about, run away worse than [Black people], and … leave as soon as anybody offers them higher wages.”

When Congress debated excluding the Chinese from the United States in 1882, Rep. Horace F. Page of California argued that the United States could not allow the entry of “millions of cooly slaves and serfs.” That racial reasoning would justify a long series of anti-Asian laws and policies on immigration and naturalization for nearly a century.

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All text above by: Moon-Ho Jung. "Making sugar, making 'coolies': Chinese laborers toiled alongside Black workers on 19th-century Louisiana plantations". The Conversation. 13 January 2022. [All bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[carsthatnevermadeitetc]

Honda 0 Series Saloon Concept, 2024. Honda has used the CES to present prototypes for a new EV series for global markets. In 2026, Honda will begin introducing the first model of the Honda 0 Series globally, starting from North America, then to Japan, Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East and South America.

Saloon concept movie  

[hirik0]

Catch me if you can part 1

Ghost/Roach | Celebrity AU

Gary 'Roach' Sanderson on Tiktok know simply as 🪳Bugboy 🪳 has one of the biggest fan edit accounts for popular actor Simon Riley best know for his roll as 'the Ghost' in a action movie the first project he worked on after his long child actor career. It was quite a change seeing him going from being the love intressted in teenage movies to a wanted CIA agent that got dropped by the agency. Roach liked both versions what maybe is related to the celebrity crush he has since he is 12. Earlier this year Simon Roley returned to the popular cop show 'The new Sherlock Holmes' he left to film a movie trilogie where he was a Knight fighting in a medieval war. Being the well beloved leader of the SWAT team, Martin Jackson, from new Scotland Yard. It honestly was a hugh suprise he returned but he told in interviews its a fun project while he looks for other interesting projects.

"Stalking Rileys social media again, Gary?", Rodolfo his colleague and best friend asks amused. Having a steaming mug with coffee in on and and an appel in the other. He places the appel on Roaches desk. Roach shakes his head, he is in fact working, staring at the grafic hes making for the past 20 minutes, trying to figure out how to make it that dont causes him to have remake it again in something way worse then what he has.

"As if you dont do the same with Alejandro Vargas", Roach retorts amused, trying to think like the higher-ups, how a social media of a sports team should look like. He knows how to run a successful account, has even a degree in it, but the higer-ups have very diffrent views. So everything has to be done 3 times till they found a compromise, so they are always 3 weeks behind trends, having to prove a trendy audio will give them engagement. God if he finds the person that put such a short leach on the marketing team, he will murder them. They work for a very old and traditional Cricket Club, emphasis on old some of the higher ups probaly where alive when the club was founded.

"Do you rember the teribel joke Mr. Henderson told last week? I need it for a post, asking people to share their own bad jokes for engagement bait." Rudy gives him do you really want to do this look. Nobody laughed about that joke, not even the old men at the top.

"Honestly my brain has a filter for his jokes so no." Roach groans dramatically, throwing his hands in the air, mumbling a I can't work like that. Bitting in the appel in frustration. Now he has to ask the man what will lead to him needing 20 minutes explaining how engagement on social media works and why it's so important. Already hearin Hendersons back in my day peopel listened over radio an we needed no silly dances on the internet, back in his day the steam maschie wasn't invented yet. Taking another bite from the appel, not liking its taste, the free fruits had better quality ones.

"Just tell him it's so good he needs to share is with the fans." Roach gives him a sceptical look, because that won't work right? It can't be that easy. Roach is ready to leave the office, when Rudy is winking him over. Rudy is curently frowning over an e-mail he got. He start reading it crossing his arms in front of his chest a cooperaton with another firm. Rudy is scrolling down to read the rest of the mail. Roach is resting his read on the back rest if Rudys chair looking over his right shoulder. Flying over the opening to were the mouse pointer is.

As i mentioned above I work at a for hire PR-Firm and are mainly know for work at Galas, Award cerominies and other red carpet events, but recently get the chance to work in other areas. We will mangaging the official Tiktok and Instagram for the hit TV show "The New Sherlock Holmes" for the up comming season and for the entiere UK and rest of Europe tour for a K-pop band. We would really love to work with your Tiktok and Instagram team to learn how they are making the short videos. We offer helping your Team for big gala events of the Club to get better resultes.

with warm regards

Valeria Graza

"Did she ask us for help and then insulted or work?", Roach is asking frowning. Finishing up the fruit.

"She sure did", Rudy say while forwarding the E-mail to their boss Kate Laswell, in the end its her choice and not theirs. Roach signs there is no more time to stall to get this stupid joke from Mr. Henderson.

"Better get the joke." He says before leaving the office to go to the elevators.

"Dont get stucked in the 1850s, while you there", Rudy is shouting after him. Rudy reads over the mail again, his eyes falling on to the name of the TV show, the chance for Roach to meet his celebrity crush, sometimes live is unfair.

[reasonsforhope]

The U.S. Department of Treasury’s gift to electric-vehicle shoppers (and global automakers) for the new year was to make many more EVs and plug-in hybrids eligible for the federal tax subsidy of up to $7,500 — including vehicles built outside North America — as long as drivers lease them or buy used rather than buy new.

EV credits and [rules] took effect Jan. 1.

One category extends the former credit of up to $7,500 for consumers buying new EVs and PHEVs, but it puts new limits on vehicle price and buyer income and will soon add requirements for the sourcing of EV batteries and materials. Additionally, since August [2022], it has required that the vehicles be assembled in North America.

A second is a new credit of up to $4,000 for buyers of used EVs.

A third is a “commercial” credit for businesses acquiring EVs. It offers up to $7,500 for light-duty vehicles (under 14,000 pounds) and up to $40,000 for heavier vehicles. Significantly, the commercial credit does not have the origin, price or other restrictions of the credit for consumer buyers.

On top of all that, the Department of Treasury guidance released at the end of December allows the less restrictive commercial credit to also apply to vehicles leased by consumers; that means most plug-in and fuel-cell EVs currently on the market can qualify, including those built in Europe or Asia. The credit goes to the leasing company — the vehicle owner — but it can be passed to the consumer in the form of lower lease payments.

The new federal rules do not affect state and local subsidies available for EV buyers [which may be able to get you even more savings].

-via Cars.com, January 12, 2023

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

BYD call on Chinese automakers to unite to 'demolish legacy auto industry

BYD call on Chinese automakers to unite to 'demolish legacy auto industry

P.S. As strange as it may sound, this kind of statement by BYD's management gives hope to legacy automakers to survive, because once the Chinese auto industry tries to establish a monopoly controlled by single company or government, Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea will have a legal basis to limit the Chinese EV "monopoly" and stimulate legacy automakers to start a serious EV manufacturing business...

Most likely, something similar to the "inflation reduction act" adopted in America will also arise in Europe. In fact, Europe has enough economic and political tools to bring manufacturing and jobs back to Europe...For example, if EVs produced in Europe are not subject to VAT...! Then European made electric cars immediately become much more competitive...

[mariacallous]

The Times has a rather odd piece today about Radek Sikorski, the new Polish foreign minister. Headlined “Why Poland’s new foreign minister reminds people of Boris Johnson,” it points out that Radek, like Johnson and indeed David Cameron, went to Oxford and joined the Bullingdon Club.

Well, yes, he did, and thank you for reminding us, but we should not hold that against him because there is one glaring and obvious difference between Boris Johnson and Radek Sikorski. Unlike so many Conservatives and Republicans, Sikorski did not succumb to populism. His return to power in Poland is an optimistic moment as it came as part of the regime change that drove the crank right law and justice party from power.

Sikorski fell out with Johnson over Brexit. He knew perfectly well that Johnson did not believe in leaving the EU because had Johnson had told him as much. But then 2016 rolled along and Johnson realised that Brexit was the cause that could propel him to power.

The story of their relationship is told by Sikorski’s wife Anne Applebaum in her memoir Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends, one of the best accounts of the rise of the new right in Europe, the UK and the US I have read.

When I gave it a glowing review in the Observer, a few readers complained. Why was I praising a conservative? I pointed out that her background meant that she understood the extent of the right’s betrayal of free markets and free societies better than any leftist. Give me a compromised insider over a purist outsider any day. The insiders know where the bodies are buried.

Here is what I wrote

Anne Applebaum can look at the wreck of democratic politics and understand it with a completeness few contemporary writers can match. When she asks who sent Britain into the unending Brexit crisis, or inflicted the Trump administration on America, or turned Poland and Hungary into one-party states, she does not need to search press cuttings. Her friends did it, she replies. Or, rather, her former friends. For if they are now embarrassed to have once known her, the feeling is reciprocated.

Applebaum’s latest book, Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends, opens with a scene a novelist could steal. On 31 December 1999, Applebaum and her husband, Radosław Sikorski, a minister in Poland’s then centre-right government, threw a party. It was a Millennium Eve housewarming for a manor house in the western Poland they had helped rebuild from ruins. The company of Poles, Brits, Americans and Russians could say that they had rebuilt a ruined world. Unlike the bulk of the left of the age, they had stood up against the Soviet empire and played a part in the fall of a cruel and suffocating tyranny. They had supported free markets, free elections, the rule of law and democracies sticking together in the EU and Nato, because these causes – surely – were the best ways for nations to help their people lead better lives as they faced Russian and Chinese power, Islamism and climate change.

They were young and happy. History’s winners. “At about three in the morning,” Applebaum recalls, “one of the wackier Polish guests pulled a pistol from her handbag and shot blanks into the air out of sheer exuberance.”

Applebaum was at the centre of the overlapping circles of guests. For the Americans, she was a child of the Republican establishment. Her father was a lawyer in Washington DC and she was educated at Yale and Oxford universities. Now her Republican friends are divided between a principled minority, who know that defeating Trump is the only way to save the American constitution, and the rest, who have, to use a word she repeats often, “collaborated” as surely as the east Europeans she studied as a historian collaborated with the invading Soviet forces after 1945.

Even when she was young, you could see the signs of the inquiring spirit that has made her a great historian. She went to work as a freelance journalist in eastern Europe while it was still under Soviet occupation and too drab and secretive a posting for most young reporters. She then made a standard career move and joined the Economist. But it was too dull for her liking and she moved to the Spectator in the early 1990s. The dilettante style of English conservatism charmed her. “These people don’t take themselves seriously and could never do serious harm,” she thought, as she watched Simon Heffer and his colleagues compete to see who could deliver the best Enoch Powell impersonation. She came to know the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton and Margaret Thatcher’s speechwriter John O’Sullivan, figures taken with unwarranted seriousness at the time. They had helped east European dissidents struggling against Soviet power in the 1980s and appeared to believe in democracy. Why would she doubt it? How could she foresee that Scruton and O’Sullivan would one day accept honours from Viktor Orbán, as he established a dictatorship in Hungary, whose rigged elections and state-controlled judiciary and media are now not so far away from the communists’ one-party state.

What was life in the English right like then, I asked in a call to her Polish lockdown in that restored manor house in the countryside between Warsaw and the German border. “It was fun,” she said.

It isn’t now.

Her husband knew Boris Johnson. They were both members of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford. She assumed that he was as much a liberal internationalist as Sikorski was. When the couple met Johnson for dinner in 2014, she noted his laziness and “all-consuming narcissism”, as well as the undoubted charisma that was to seduce and then ruin his country. In those days, Johnson appeared friendly. He was alarmed by the global challenge to democracy, he told them, and wanted to defend “the culture of freedom and openness and tolerance”. They asked about Europe. “No one serious wants to leave the EU,” he replied, which was true enough as Johnson was to prove when he came out for Brexit.

As for the Poles at the party, they knew Applebaum as a friend who had co-authored a Polish cookbook, and published histories of communism, which never forgot its victims.

Today she is a heretical figure across the right in Europe and America. Many of her guests would damage their careers if they admitted to their new masters they had once broken bread at her table.

Heretics make the best writers. They understand a movement better than outsiders, and can relate its faults because they have seen them close up. Religions can tolerate pagans. They are mere unbelievers who have never known the way, the truth and the light. The heretic has the advantages of the inside trader. She can use her knowledge to expose and betray the faithful. One question always hangs in the air, however: who is betraying whom? Although Applebaum has left the right, and stopped voting Conservative in Britain in 2015 and Republican in the US in 2008, she can make a convincing case that the right betrayed her.

In person, Applebaum combines intense concentration with an exuberant delight in human folly. You can be in the middle of a deadly serious conversation and suddenly she will break into a grin as the memory of a politician’s hypocrisy or an incomprehensible stupidity hits her. As the western crisis has deepened, the intensity has come to dominate her writing as she provides urgently needed insights.

You can read thousands of discussions of the “root causes” of what we insipidly call “populism”. The academic studies aren’t all wrong, although too many are suspiciously partial. The left says austerity and inequality caused Brexit and Trump, proving they had always been right to oppose austerity and inequality. The right blames woke politics and excessive immigration, and again you can hear the self-satisfaction in the explanation.

Applebaum offers an overdue corrective. She knows the personal behind the political. She understands that the nationalist counter-revolution did not just happen. Politicians hungry for office, plutocrats wanting the world to obey their commands, second-rate journalists sniffing a chance of recognition after years of obscurity, and Twitter mob-raisers and fake news fraudsters, who find a sadist’s pleasure in humiliating their opponents, propelled causes that would satisfy them.

Applebaum let out a snort that must have been heard for miles around her Polish home when I mentioned the journalist and author David Goodhart’s pro-Brexit formulation that we are living through an uprising by the “people from somewhere” against the “people from nowhere” – a modern variant on the old communist condemnations of “rootless cosmopolitans”, incidentally. It’s a war of one part of the elite against another part of the elite, she says. Brexit was an elite project. “The game was to get everyone to go along with it”. Were all the southern Tories who voted for it a part of the oppressed masses? “And who do you think funded the campaign?”

She is as wary of the commonplace view that supporters of Trump, say, are conformists, who have been brainwashed online or by Fox News. They may be now in some part, but brainwashing does not explain how populist movements begin. Their leaders weren’t from small towns full of abandoned shops and drug-ridden streets. They were metropolitans, with degrees from Oxford in the case of Johnson and Dominic Cummings. The men and women Applebaum knew were not loyal drones but filled with a dark restlessness. They may pose as the tribunes of the common people now but they were members of the intellectual and educated elite willing to launch a war on the rest of the intellectual and educated elite.

Populist activists are outsiders only in that they feel insufficiently rewarded. And their opponents should never underestimate what their self-pitying vanity can make them do.

One of Applebaum’s closest Polish friends, the godmother of one of her children, and a guest at the 1999 party, provided her with the most striking example. She moved from being a comfortable but obscure figure to become a celebrated Warsaw hostess and a confidante to Poland’s new rulers. She signalled her break and opened her prospects for advancement with a call to Applebaum within days of the Smolensk air crash of April 2010. She let her know she was adopting a conspiracy theory that would make future friendship impossible.

Outsiders need to take a deep breath before trying to understand it. Among the dead was Lech Kaczyński, the president of Poland, who controlled the rightwing populist party Law and Justice with his twin brother, Jarosław Kaczyński. The party has grown to dominate Polish politics, and the supposedly independent courts, media and civil service. The flight recorder showed that the pilot had come in too low in thick fog, and that was an end to it. Jarosław Kaczyński and his underlings insist that the Russians were behind the crash, or that political rivals in Warsaw, including Applebaum’s husband, allowed the president to fly in a faulty plane, or that it was an assassination. Repeating the lie was the price of admission to Law and Justice’s ruling circles and the public sector jobs they controlled. As Applebaum noted in the Atlantic magazine: “Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie – it’s to make people fear the liar.” Acknowledge the liar’s power, and your career takes off without the need to pass exams or to display an elementary level of competence.

Other friends from the party showed their fealty to the new order by promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories. The darker their fantasies became, the more airtime Polish state broadcasters gave them. “They had not suffered or been ‘left behind’ in any way,” Applebaum says. Yet they happily worked for propaganda sites that targeted her family. Because she is married to a political opponent of Law and Justice, and because she writes critical pieces in the international press, Applebaum, who had faced no racism in Poland until Law and Justice came to power, was turned by the regime’s creatures into the clandestine Jewish coordinator of “anti-Polish activity”.

I once believed you should never let politics destroy a friendship. But that maxim depends on politics not turning into a danger to you and those you love. Applebaum could not stay friends with women who would not protest as the state they supported went for her and husband.

The Anglo-Saxon world is not so different from Poland and Hungary. Britain has handled Covid-19 so disastrously because only servile nobodies, willing to pretend that a no-deal Brexit would not harm the country, could gain admittance to Boris Johnson’s cabinet. As Johnson politicises the public sector, showing “fear of the liar” looks like becoming the best way to secure a job in the higher ranks of the civil service as well. American Republicans have had to go along with every lie Trump has told since his birther slur on Barack Obama. As for breaking friendships, British Jews broke theirs when they watched friends in Labour cheer on Jeremy Corbyn and thought: “If they ever came for me and my family, you would stand by, wouldn’t you?”

Careerism is too glib an explanation for selling out, and Applebaum is too good a historian to offer it. Likewise, bigotry and racial prejudice were never enough on their own to move her friends away from liberal democracy. Among Applebaum’s acquaintances is one of Orbán’s greatest cheerleaders. She has a gay son, but that has not stopped her espousing the cause of a homophobic regime. Laura Ingraham, a Fox News presenter, became one of the earliest supporters of Trump, despite the fact that she has adopted three immigrant children.

Rather than grab at standard explanations, Applebaum understands that a society based on merit may sound fine if you want to live in a country run by talented people. But what if you are not yourself talented? Since the 1950s, criticisms of meritocracy have become so commonplace they have passed into cliche. Not one I have read or indeed written stops to consider how one-party states represent the anti-meritocratic society in its purest form. Among her friends who became the servants of authoritarian movements, Applebaum sees the consequences of the lust for status among resentful men and women, who believe the old world never gave them their due.

They were privileged by normal standards but nowhere near as privileged as they expected to be. Talking to Applebaum, I imagined a British government abolishing press freedom and the independence of the judiciary and the civil service. I didn’t doubt for a moment that there would be thousands of mediocre journalists, broadcasters, lawyers and administrators who would happily work for the new regime if it pandered to their vanity by giving them the jobs they could never have taken on merit. Hannah Arendt wrote of the communists and fascists that they replaced “first-rate talents” with “crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity” was the best guarantee of their loyalty. She might have been talking about contemporary Poland, Britain and America.

“Given the right conditions any society can turn against democracy,” Applebaum says, and explains why better than any modern writer I know. To the political consequences of offended vanity – Why am I not more important? Why does the BBC never call? – a sense of despair is vital. If you believe, like the American right, that godless enemies want to destroy your Christian country, and prove their malice by not giving you the rewards you deserve, or think, like Scruton and the Telegraph crowd of the 1990s, that English culture and history is being thrown in the bin, and you are being chucked away with it, or agree with the supporters of the new tyrants of eastern Europe that a liberal elite is plotting to extinguish your culture by importing Muslim immigrants, and proving its contempt for all that is decent by laughing at you, then any swine will do as long as the swine can stop it. You will pay any price and abandon any principle in the struggle against a demonic enemy.

Shouldn’t she have seen it coming, I ask her. Shouldn’t she have realised that the world she inhabited included authoritarians, who would turn on her and everything she believed in. Typically, instead of huffing, puffing, and trying to pretend she has never been in the wrong, she laughs and admits that she probably should have asked harder questions sooner of her former friends.

Readers should be glad she bided her time. Applebaum can bring a candle into the darkness of the populist right precisely because she stayed on the right for so long. She does not know whether it can be beaten. She’s a journalist not a soothsayer. But I know that if you want to fight it, her writing is an arsenal that stores the sharpest weapons to hand.

[head-post]

EU backs tariffs on Chinese EVs

Most EU member states backed plans to impose taxes on electric vehicle (EV) imports from China, according to the BBC.

Over the next five years, up to 45 per cent charges will be imposed on EVs made in China. The aim is to protect the European car industry. However, critics are concerned that the move could lead to higher EV prices for customers.

The decision, which splits EU member states such as France and Germany, risks provoking a trade war between Brussels and Beijing. China is counting on high-tech products to help revive its economy, with the EU being the largest overseas market for the country’s EV industry.

Chinese car brands including BYD started entering international markets, prompting concerns from the EU that its own companies would not be able to compete with lower prices. Brussels imposed import duties of different levels on a range of Chinese manufacturers over the summer, but a vote on Friday was to decide whether they would be imposed over the next five years.

The European Commission imposed individual tariffs on China’s three main EV brands – SAIC, BYD and Geely. However, Germany, whose car industry heavily relies on exports to China, opposed them. Some EU members also abstained from voting.

The tariff proposal could only be blocked if a qualified majority of 15 members voted against it. The European Commission, which conducted the vote, stated that the EU and China would “work hard to explore an alternative solution” to import taxes to address the so-called “injurious subsidisation” of Chinese EVs. Read more HERE

[molycuddle]

“It’s China’s fault we’re not fighting climate change quick enough!!”

“It’s China’s fault that entry of electric vehicles into western markets has been slow.”

It’s not Europe and America’s constant trade disputes with them that’s preventing the switch to renewable energy or anything lmfao

It’s not like China isn’t one of the larger investors in renewable energy and EVs or anything pfft

It’s not like European countries have been rolling back their climate action or anything lmfao

China is not great, but the trade war against them is not helping us and all this is going to do is delay more climate action.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this EcoWatch story:

The five biggest countries in the European Union spend 42 billion euros each year on subsidizing fossil-fuel-powered company cars, a new study commissioned by Transport & Environment (T&E) says.

The report by Environmental Resources Management (ERM), “Company car fossil fuel subsidies in Europe,” called for increased subsidies for electric vehicles (EVs).

“This is completely illogical and completely unacceptable, that we’re still pouring billions of taxpayer money into a technology that’s completely contradictory to the European Commission’s green transition agenda,” Stef Cornelis, T&E’s fleet director, told Reuters.

About 60 percent of new cars sold in Europe are company cars.

“Company cars are seen as perks provided to employees as a part of their salary. While they are partially intended for work travel, they are also used privately – such as for commuting – to the benefit of the driver,” a press release from T&E said. “This is the first study of its kind that calculates these subsidies for every car model registered in Europe’s six biggest car markets, rather than relying on archetypal averages or example models.”

According to the study, Italy gives 16 billion euros annually in fossil fuel company vehicle subsidies, followed by Germany’s 13.7 billion euros.

France provides 6.4 billion euros in dirty fuel company car subsidies each year, with Poland close behind with 6.1 billion.

“Very high fossil fuel subsidies are found in Italy, Germany, France and Poland. This is mainly due to significant benefit-in-kind (BiK) tax breaks for petrol and diesel company car drivers. This tax break overwhelmingly benefits the most affluent consumers, with company car drivers earning nearly double as much as the average European consumer,” T&E said in the press release.