It’s gonna be on the renewables/battery cells. The West has been huffing the “but China pollutes more than us!” copium for so long that there’s no acknowledgement of how much China has been building out and investing in that sector. So when fossil fuel costs become untenable, the West will look to renewables and batteries only to find China has the supply and manufacturing corned. At which point there will be a panic, probably some whining that China was somehow being unethical in preparing for the energy shift,
I could also see it on fusion power. I know fusion power is always 10 years away but it’s always 10 years away because nobody has invested into it. China actually is in a more meaningful way that could make it happen. Imagine a nation that produces so much of the world’s shit being able to produce it on extremely low cost fusion power. There would be no competition
I’ve seen “fusion is always 40 years away” slowly decrease to “fusion is always 10 years away” over my lifetime and at a certain point I wonder if the problem is just that people don’t know how long a year is.
That wouldn’t be enough unfortunately. In fact it would probably have the opposite effect of “oh wow MURRICA already did that many years ago”. China needs to do something undeniable that also carries spectacle for the Western media to care. Their remarkable achievements around manufacturing and lifting their entire country out of poverty aren’t flashy so Western media doesn’t give a shit about them. It needs to be something flashy
probably some whining that China was somehow being unethical in preparing for the energy shift,
Funnily enough, one of the more common theories circulating for decades is that the western oil and energy companies have been stifling alternative solutions and research for all that time and are just sitting on ready tech to roll out when the oil runs out. Current events already proven that while the first part of that theory is undeniably correct, second one is not, as if monopoly corpos ever planned that much for the future.
