Peter Zeihan

Sometimes you're going to put this in the electrodes as well.

There's a lot of moving pieces.

And that's one of the reasons why I'm a little hopeful, because a lot of people are playing with a lot of different chemistries to see if they can come up with something better.

Lots of countries have announced that either for their cities or for their countries.

And unless they're willing to subsidize it to a huge degree, it's not going to happen anywhere.

That doesn't necessarily mean that I have a problem with those goals.

Let me use the California example.

California gets a lot of shit.

California deserves a lot of the shit that they get.

But when it comes to regulation, the state legislature has empowered their regulatory bodies to create these regulations to say, you know, we want to be carbon-free or we want to be on the grid by this year.

We want to have no non-EVs sold in the state by this year.

And as time moves on, if the technology is not manifesting to make that policy –

The regulator has the authority, without going back to the state legislature, to move the date or change the mandate.

It's a little bit more intelligent than most people give California credit for, and we're going to probably see a lot of places climbing down.

We've seen a lot of countries in the last couple of years back away from a lot of what they've done with EVs because it's just not working out.

At scale, the Chinese are the ones in the biggest pickle.

They import about 70% of their oil, about similar number for natural gas, and the vast majority of that comes through the Strait of Malacca, probably originating in the Middle East.

And so if you ever have a real dust-up with either Japan or the United States or India or Vietnam or Australia or Sri Lanka or Pakistan or Oman, that all stops.

It's really easy to cut completely.

For more traditional places, the Europeans are getting clever.