That's why I differentiated between Chinese made cars and Chinese brands.

Goods are mostly luxury. Fuel, minerals, industry and agriculture are necessity when shit hits the fan.

For the moment Xi is using foreign investment while keeping Chinese poor to snowball the industrial hollowing out of his geopolitical enemies (ie. everyone).

This is not sustainable and causes problems down the line. First autarky for China and dependence and cheap goods for the west ... then when the gravy train stops, third world west.

Neomercantilism loads down sinking ship with cheap TVs, it doesn't raise all boats.

Bet classical Egypt had a ( Nile-based ) postal service ... Tigress/Euphrates cultures certainly did. In the USA New Deal government-jobs were a model of efficiency for their time. Sadly government services  have  NOT become more efficient/responsive/effective. Still, something to be said for  easily communicating with another human W/O using electricity. Extra points for hand-writing  with  real ink on real parchment. Do I trust FedEX? Hahahaha...

Interestingly though, while 20% of European sales of new cars are already BEVs, it's not the Chinese cars dominating. Chinese brands only have about 3% of the market, while BEVs made in China by non-Chinese brands like Tesla account for 8% of all car sales. The BEV market in Europe is dominated by Stellantis and Volkswagen. with some heavy dose of Korean brands.

It'd make my year if he went back to that. Ever since Hasbro bought them, they've looked like these useless contraptions made by Dr. Seuss; we need to get back to the CPS2000 and the other turn-of-the-century models that were actually effective at their intended purpose.

Sorry Charlie ... of-course analog is "better".  You cannot warm your hands while listening to CSNY or Blind-Faith on a solid state amplifier .... unlike the orange-tube glow of McIntosh amp & pre-amp whispering thru 12" Advent speakers.  Very like some people cannot tell chicken-coupe raised  from free-range .

Batteries don't work everywhere, biofuel is unsustainable and can't scale, e-fuel is a very inefficient hydrogen storage method, direct air capture and sequestration is expensive, primary metal air batteries and the recycling methods for them are way less developed than hydrogen.

Where batteries and (fast) charging works, sure use it ... where it doesn't all other net zero options suck as hard or harder than liquid hydrogen.

Price for Lithium has been dropping the last few years, manganese stable.

Buy it and it will come.

It's just some smoke and mirrors to stick to the status quo. Just like Sustainable Aviation Fuel and burning forests in old coal power plant.

Unfortunately to maintain the smoke and mirrors they are destroying the planet multiple times faster than just sticking to fossil fuel. Paris targets are holy, meeting them is far more important than the environment.

A few factories to transform used cooking oil and gassify waste are just fucking around in the margins. To go beyond that you are going to be slashing the few remaining forests and even then it won't scale to net zero, not enough planet for it.

Anything is better than biofuel, including fossil fuel.

Also China isn't going to slow down with EV and hydrogen ... if the EU tries to save aging VW investments, they are not only going to fail, they are going to fail harder. Or is the EU going to go full protectionist AND stick to ICEs at the same time?

Rules don't keep society together, shame and discrimination do.

In a society which feels no shame and which declares freedom of association a crime, this is the result.

"...a society that allows people to get incredibly rich or incredibly powerful is pretty much broken." Are you insane or just Marxist green with envy ? Every successful culture in human history has rewarded the extremely productive individual with extreme wealth. Inherited wealth is a "friction", but not intolerable.  Individual financial reward  is as true for the post-mod GPU-designer as it was for 18-th Century French loom-builders and  iron-age Hittite silk-road merchants. Parasitic DEI  "party" states like Stalins Russia and Maos China quickly collapsed -- Russia into a mafia/cartel hell-hole and China into a facsimile of 19-th Century England. So why didn't USA elect Ross Perot as president? Beat sh*t out'a me. My ex-gal-pal said his ears were too big.

My problems are ALWAYS your problems !  We are referencing a very entitled generation. The rich are entitled to grift, the poor are entitled to steal, the feb entitled to teach  and the down-trodden  entitled to invade. It's a perverse multiplexing of   Leon Trotsky,  Ann Rand & John Watson.

Just checked the Ukraine wind-map. Winds generally toward the north-west. Thus Russian damage to the Chernobyl cladding threatens Western Europe with radiation fallout. Teach those Euros to support  the Ukraine against Russian aggression. Mebby the French need to scatter  5-tons of their dirty reactor-waste over Moscow and see how Ivan fares.  Oh wait ...  better start with one of Russias Black Sea resorts filled with "party" members and mafia. No reason to casually mess-up some of the best museums in the world.