China will have a critical mass of research, scientists, manufacturing, engineers, and the right government buy in to stay ahead because there's so much demand.

Tesla is stuck with a cylindrical battery supply chain because they built that out. Basically their undoing since their cars are crappy enough where they need to compete on price alone. They give away their margin by buying 3p prismatics for their bottom end offerings. So being first can and does burn you badly.

And that SLS launched first isn't surprising it started to get 2 billion $ a year funding long before SpaceX had any money to invest in such projects.

And what matters for a rocket isn't 'first to orbit' that's only how idiots compare rockets. What matters is first 10 or even 100 flights.

And as for R&D, fine do R&D, but you still have to produce what actually sells. The simple fact is, hydrogen cars, either fuel cell or ICE are rounding errors. They have been rounding errors for decades and have made essentially no progress despite 50+ years of continuous government funding and R&D.

They are not just doing R&D, they have literally spend marketing money demonizing EVs. They have encouraged and leaned in to all government lead efforts to delay the EV industry. They have lobbied for regressive legislation. To act as if 'all they do is some nice R&D' is pathetic.

Toyota has not done like Tesla and invested in infrastructure, like hydrogen fuel stations. Because they know this is delusional and will never happen. Their hope has always been that government is going to build all the infrastructure for them, and pay for their R&D. They have been grifting government R&D money for literal decades. Even while with just a fraction of that money the EV industry was established. They have been lobbying Japans government for decades and have used that to prevent more beneficial R&D and infrastructure investment.

And Toyota is barley even selling these 'diversified portfolios'. Go and actually try to buy a hydrogen ICE or hydrogen fuel cell cars. In literally 99.9% of the world you can't buy them.

Hydrogen is a pipe-dream propped up by government budgets and anybody that believed in its wide deployment in 2000 was a moron, anybody that still believes in it in 2027 is straight up delusional. So if anybody is divorced from reality its you.

The oil industry is irrelevant here and feels more like a whataboutism deflection. We can debate the oil industry, based on your comment we'd likely agree on much of it, but that's a separate discussion.

And they do have plenty of flaws to call out, though living in the US today I don't want to throw stones in a glass house...

The company would not exist as it does today without such funding.

Your comment would be like if 85% of the market was EVs and you said that cars with manual transmission are still doing great, better than autos.

The future is affordable, well built Chinese EVs. They already have the capacity to build 50M EVs per year, more than half of global total light vehicle demand. They are currently exporting ~12M/year, and constrained only by there not being enough marine car carriers available to ship more. They are building more car carriers to ramp exports to the world. How long would it take the US to learn how to build 10-20M EVs per year? A decade, probably more, on current trajectories, during which Chinese automakers will continue to ramp. “Build the machine that builds the machine.”

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586250

(the US sold out its future in this context for globalization and shareholder returns, unfortunately)

PV entrepreneurs are the real heroes of the climate movement, IMHO. They figured out markets that would have enough demand to push forward with developing the tech. Germany's government is a major hero too, they pushed the tech forward so far at a crucial time. Then China took up the mantle.

Both supply and demand need to build together for the industry to grow. Government subsidies played a huge role in accelerating this, and will have paid for themselves so many times over. We're going to live in a world of super-cheap technology thanks to the modest tax-cut-based investments of governments the world over.

It does suck that so many powerful people were against the obvious-in-retrospect good idea of solar PV, but I'd love to focus on all the heroes that pushed through anyway and made it happen. They deserve a lot of thanks!