Why is the US not investing in these kinds of infrastructure build outs? I’m not trying to start a flame war, I’m generally curious.
I understand the path dependence that, for example, made the US adopt mobile phones much later than everybody else (a modern and high quality wire plant that wasn’t yet amortized). Things like that make things like train networks hard to build too.
But bus fleets turn over relatively quickly and incrementally as well. What’s the barrier? The announced deployments all seem like small beer.
China is moving unbelievably fast on electric vehicles.
Their government is extremely motivated to stamp out air pollution, and there's nothing really stopping them.
It's easy to spend lots of money on infrastructure when there is a rocket-ship economy and no political opposition.
The US is behind the rest of the world on vehicle electrification for a couple good reasons (very cheap gasoline and long distances between cities) and a few crappy ones (anti-science Republicans and large rent-seeking auto companies).
The U.S. legislative system has to cater to everyone's interests. Which is not bad per se, but when it comes to something like this, new environmental laws will always hollow out an entire industry. No matter what new enforcement they try to enact, there'll always be someone powerful lobbying against it.
Agree. Not limit to the energy policy. US politicians are more often doing serious but not quite visible damage to long term interests. Just most modern US citizen are not aware of. There are some exceptions like Taleb Nassim but the voices never go through main stream
I understand the path dependence that, for example, made the US adopt mobile phones much later than everybody else (a modern and high quality wire plant that wasn’t yet amortized). Things like that make things like train networks hard to build too.
But bus fleets turn over relatively quickly and incrementally as well. What’s the barrier? The announced deployments all seem like small beer.