Friedman: How Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ Will Make China Great Again

Can you hear it that loud roar coming from the East It s the sound of billion Chinese cackling at us The Chinese absolutely can t believe their luck that at the dawn of the electricity-guzzling era of artificial intelligence the U S president and his party have decided to engage in one of the greatest acts of strategic self-harm imaginable They have passed a giant bill that among other craziness deliberately undermines America s ability to generate electricity through renewables solar battery and wind power in particular And why Because they view those as liberal vitality sources even though in the current era they are the quickest and cheapest approaches to boost our electricity grid to meet the explosion of demand from AI information centers Dependence Day It is exactly the opposite of what China is doing Indeed Beijing may have to make July its own national holiday going forward American Electricity Dependence Day You cannot make this up Even Saudi Arabia is doubling down on solar power to meet the demands of the A I input centers it wants to recruit from the West while Trump s big beautiful bill in fact does just the opposite Related Articles US judge says China s Huawei Technologies must face criminal event for racketeering and other charges Letters By electing Tordillos S J District rejects corporate influence Trump Mobile still states its phone is Made in the USA But it pulled that language from its site US financial sector shrank between January and March worse than earlier estimates had revealed Trump extends TikTok ban deadline for a third time without clear legal basis It rapidly phases out tax credits enjoyed by utility-scale solar and wind as well as electric car tax credits This virtually guarantees that China will own the future of solar ability wind power and electric cars and trucks as well as autonomous vehicles Thankfully Trump and friends did keep until a major Biden-era tax credit for companies that build other emissions-free technologies such as nuclear reactors hydroelectric dams geothermal plants and battery storage The matter is that it can take up to years to build a nuclear plant in America and as The New York Times informed the bill added complex restrictions to the battery credits that bar recipients from having ties to prohibited foreign entities like China As a aftermath a few worry that the restrictions are so complicated that the credits could end up being unusable for numerous projects In sum this dog s breakfast of a bill rushed through without a single congressional hearing with independent force experts or even one scientist is sure to put at pitfall billions of dollars of investments in renewable capacity mostly in Republican states and potentially kill the jobs of tens of thousands of U S workers By the way the bill also bans for years a first-ever fee on excess methane emissions from oil and gas production a key driver of global warming So in one fell swoop this bill will make your home hotter your air conditioning bill higher your clean vigor job scarcer America s auto industry weaker and China happier How does that make sense It doesn t And the person in America who knows that best is veritably Elon Musk It is really sad to me that Musk who is without question one of America s greatest manufacturing innovators having started globally leading companies making electric vehicles renewable rockets battery storage and telecommunications satellites has discredited himself with so a multitude of voters because of his dalliance with Trump and because of his Department of Leadership Efficiency s capricious cuts to the regime workforce Utterly insane Because of that various will not understand the vital truth that Musk has been shouting to his fellow Americans Trump s bill is utterly insane and destructive It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future This is not complicated and this is what China knows There has never been a more intimate connection than there is now between a nation s ability to generate huge amounts of electricity at affordable prices and in the cleanest way workable and its ability to develop AI engines that consume huge amounts of electricity as they learn and generate answers that could give us the tools we need to cure diseases discover new materials and even produce the holy grail of cheap clean climate-saving fusion resource To put it differently there has never been a more intimate connection between the amount of cheap clean electricity a nation can generate for AI models and its future economic and military might Sparse Americans understand how far ahead of us China already is in this realm and moving further ahead and faster every day Consider this snapshot In China produced just over terawatt hours of electricity while the U S produced nearly a terawatt is equal to million megawatts Fast forward to in contemporary times China produces over terawatt hours while the U S since has added only an increase of only in decades Much of China s electricity improvement originally came from expanded coal-fired generation but in newest years it has been driven by expanding hydro solar wind and battery sources which are easier cheaper and quicker to build and also help the surroundings Solar loses big As for Trump s goal of making America globally vigor dominant during his term of office his bill just made that impossible There is no path to potency dominance in the next five years without renewables Let s say you want to generate additional electricity for more evidence centers just through natural gas in the current era Even if you have an abundance of gas as America does you need more giant turbines to convert the gas to electricity If you ask the major manufacturers of those turbines GE Vernova Siemens Resource and Mitsubishi Power they will likely tell you that they will be very happy to deliver you one but you will be lucky to have it installed by That is how long their backlogs are And there is no telling what that turbine will cost with all of Trump s new steel and aluminum tariffs By contrast you can build and put online a new solar farm with battery storage in Texas in just months A Texas potential expert Doug Lewin posted last week that the Texas grid known as ERCOT not long ago announced that the state had added megawatts of power in just the last year the greater part of it from supercheap solar power with battery storage so force can be distributed at night when the sun is not shining As a product Texas has seen a drop in brownouts on its grid because of more renewables combined with bigger storage batteries Texas can still deploy solar-plus-batteries in the future but now the electricity will cost consumers a lot more thanks to the Trump bill If that higher monthly electricity bill bothers you call Potential Secretary Chris Wright He assuredly knows better but like every other sycophant in Trump s Cabinet he seems to have just communicated the boss what he craved to hear As Wright must know solar strength plus storage batteries made up of the new electricity quota added in the U S in according to the U S Power Information Administration Now Trump s idiotic bill will slash that amount The product for Americans The research firm Vigor Innovation whose peer-reviewed vigor modeling is widely respected projects that Trump s effort to diminish America s renewable potential industry will cause wholesale electric power prices to increase roughly by and that cumulative annual consumer capacity costs will increase more than billion by It also projects that about renewable force jobs will be lost or not created by For all of these reasons I am certain there are only two political parties in the world at present cheering the passage of this bill Trump s Republican Party and the Chinese Communist Party because nothing is more destined to make China great again than Trump s big beautiful America surrenders the future of electricity to Beijing bill Thomas Friedman is a New York Times columnist