Comrade Trump  🔗 **Source:** [Comrade Trump](https://share.snipd.com/episode/98b94937-a494-48c3-8a97-9b97d306b39d) ## Highlights - **Tariffs Sent Cheap Solar To Pakistan First** - Trump inadvertently accelerated clean energy adoption by shutting Chinese solar out of the US market. - Cheap panels flooded Pakistan, letting households adopt solar en masse so grid demand collapsed and bridal dowries include panels, inverting the usual rich-to-poor tech flow. Transcript: Cory Doctorow There aren't a lot of things I agree with Mark Carney about, but there's one area where he and I are in total accord. The old U.S.-dominated, rules-based international order was total bullshit. Unlike Carney, I never pretended to like that old order, and indeed, I spent my entire life fighting against it, literally all the way back to childhood, organizing other children To march against Canada's participation in America's nuclear weapons programs. All of which means that my experience of the Trump years is decidedly weird. On the one hand, I exist in a near-perpetual state of anxious misery as Trump and his chud army of Christian nationalists and degenerate gamblers pursue a program of gleeful genocide. But at the same time, I'm living in a world in which Trump is, inadvertently, dismantling many of the worst aspects of the old order in favor of something decidedly better. Take Trump's tariff policy. Back during Trump 1, he decided that Americans couldn't buy Chinese solar anymore, which had the double benefit of allowing him to pursue the twin goals of throwing red meat to sinophobic Cold War II freaks and delivering a giant gift to the planet-wrecking oil companies that helped him buy his way into office. This was really bad for America, of course, but those solar panels had to go somewhere. Mostly they ended up in Pakistan, dumped there at such a massive discount that the country solarized virtually overnight. Pakistani solar installers learned their trade from TikTok videos set to Tamil film soundtracks and unwired the country so thoroughly that today the national power company is in Danger of going bust because no one buys their electricity from the grid anymore. Pakistani bridal dowries now routinely include four panels, an inverter, and a battery. This is an inversion of the normal order of things in which rich countries get all the good stuff first and poor countries like Pakistan get scraps after we've gorged ourselves. Think of vaccine apartheid ([Time 0:03:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/717026f5-d665-4b2f-89a3-5648420cd621)) - **Rationing Forces Permanent Energy Behavior Change** - Prolonged energy shortages create permanent demand shifts because rationing forces large, visible investments. - Examples: Indian restaurateurs switching to induction and widespread EV and charger purchases after sustained scarcity change habits permanently. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Transitory energy shortages have small effects. When your energy bill goes up for a while, because of extreme weather, say, it makes you angry and sad and might result in an electoral loss for whatever politician presided over the Price hike. But when you get genuine prolonged shortages, the sort that are accompanied by rationing, you make permanent changes. Rationing is so psychologically scarring that it induces people to make long-delayed investments that result in permanent changes to their consumption habits. Maybe you've known for a long time that an induction top would be better for your indoor air quality and your cooking than the gas range you have now, but you don't want to buy a whole new Appliance and pay for an electrician to run a high-wattage line in expensive conduit from your breaker panel to your kitchen. But if you're an Indian restaurateur who can no longer get any cooking gas because it's being rationed for household use, then you are going out to buy whatever induction top you can Lay hands on. Maybe it's a cheap low-powered single burner one that plugs into your existing electrics, or maybe you're splashing out and swapping out your whole gas appliance. Whichever it is, you are no longer interested in your chef's insistence that real cooking gets done over gas. If your chef can't cook on an induction top, your chef will need to find employment elsewhere. This is going on all over the world right now, as people buy EVs and pay to have charters installed at home, maybe getting a twofer on their conduit runs with two high power lines run through The same conduit infrastructure. In Australia, where the last shipment of gas for the foreseeable came into port last week, people are calling their local EV dealers and offering to buy whatever car is on the lot, sight Unseen. Meanwhile, in Ethiopia, a series of dollar-related crises caused the country to ban imports of internal combustion engines altogether. Oil and gas are denominated in dollars, which means that you can only get oil if you first sell stuff to Americans or others who will pay in dollars. The country's fleet of noisy, dirty motorbikes is swiftly being replaced by e-bikes that get eight miles to the penny. E-bikes are insanely great technology. Cheap, rugged, and reliable, they're basically bicycles that abolish hills. Once you've gotten accustomed to an e-bike, maybe you've invested in a folding helmet and a raincoat, you'll never go back. ([Time 0:06:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/03eb5e62-8ec2-4aed-9272-0ef655f110f9)) - **Ukraine War Pushed UK Balcony Solar Approval** - Europe and the UK shifted policy after Russia's 2022 Ukraine invasion accelerated clean-tech moves and approvals. - Even the UK began greenlighting balcony solar, despite long-standing planning and aesthetic objections in British politics. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Four years ago, another mad emperor, Vladimir Putin, invaded Ukraine, and in so doing, Europe's energy transition into the Greta scene with unimaginable defeats for the fossil fuel Lobby. Not just subsidies for the clean energy transition, but also policy shifts in areas that had been deadlocked for a decade, like approvals for balcony solar, which is transforming The continent. Even the UK, one of the oil industry's most reliable vassal states, is now greenlighting balcony solar. This may not sound like much, but the UK is a country whose politics is composed of 50% hatred of migrants and trans people and 50% incredibly stupid planning battles. Britain is a magical land where your neighbors can ask the government to prevent you from installing double glazing on the grounds that it will change the historic character of their Neighborhood of terraced Victorian homes. I once lost a fight to get permission to put a little glass greenhouse on my balcony on the grounds that it would alter the facade of the undistinguished low-rise 1960s industrial building I live on top of. The fact that His Majesty's government is going to tell your facade-obsessed neighbors to fuck off all the way into the sun so that you can hang solar panels off your balcony is nothing Short of a miracle. Comrade Putin's contribution to oil-soaked Britain's energy transition can't be overstated. Thanks to free market policies that sent energy prices soaring after the Ukraine invasion, Brits installed so much solar, despite the existing impediments to solarization, that Now the government is begging us to use more energy this summer because the grid can't absorb all those lovely free electrons. ([Time 0:09:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c1c2cc22-1c10-4a9d-a882-50fa4d635ce7)) - **Critical Mineral Fears Are Being Eased By Alternatives** - Global supply concerns over critical minerals are easing as alternatives emerge and scale. - Example: lithium batteries are on the verge of being supplanted by far more abundant sodium batteries, reducing resource bottlenecks. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Australia also benefited from Trump One's solar embargo, receiving a ton of cheap solar that would otherwise have ended up in America. Now Australia has so much solar that they're giving away electricity with three free hours of unlimited energy every day. Stick your dishwasher, clothes dryer, and EV charger on a timer, invest in a battery or two, and fill your boots. Maybe at this point you're thinking dark thoughts about critical minerals and such. That's not the problem you think it is, and it's getting better every day. To take just one example, lithium batteries are about to be replaced with sodium batteries. ([Time 0:11:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3971e1ee-a0c1-4e7e-a42c-dbe967d68205)) - **Solar Wins Even In Red Rural Districts** - Clean tech adoption can cut across political divides when tangible local benefits are visible. - In Texas, solar on ranches provides shade, irrigation savings, and prompted Republican ranchers to kill a fossil-favoring bill, calling it 'DEI for fossil fuels.' Transcript: Cory Doctorow To take just one example here, Texas ranchers have been solarizing thanks to the state's bizarre free market energy system that sees energy prices spiking so high during cold snaps That you literally have to choose between freezing to death and going bankrupt. Solar is great for agriculture, especially in climate-ravaged Texas, it provides crucial shade for crops and livestock while substantially reducing soil evaporation, resulting In substantial irrigation savings. When the oil-captured Texas legislature introduced a bill to force electric companies to add one wad of fossil power for every watt of solar that their customers installed, furious Ranchers from blood-red Republican rural districts flooded their town hall meetings, decrying the plan as, quote, DEI for fossil fuels. The bill died. ([Time 0:12:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e23850cd-6267-4dc7-b881-58c7d8affc6a)) - **Trump Broke The Legal Shield Of US Tech Hegemony** - Trump's tech belligerence and tariffs broke key protections of US internet dominance, enabling tech sovereignty moves. - By weaponizing platforms and violating trade rules, he removed anti-circumvention legal cover and made a post-American internet feasible. Transcript: Cory Doctorow One of the most developments that Trumpismo's incontinent belligerence has induced is the global technology transition. For decades, the only people pointing out the dangers of using America's cash-grabbing, privacy-invading, defective tech exports were digital rights hippies like me, and our victories Were modest and far between. Despite the Snowden revelations, despite the tech industry's prolific snoot-cocking at EU privacy regulators and Canadian lawmakers, we all just carried on using these incredibly Dangerous, steadily and shittifying big tech products. We even run our governments and structurally important companies off big tech. We let U.S. Tech companies update, that is, downgrade, the software on our cars and tractors, our pacemakers and ventilators, our power plants and telephone switches. There's lots of reasons for this. For one thing, ripping out and replacing all that software and firmware is a prodigious challenge, as is building the data centers to host it for every digitally sovereign country. Add to that the complexity of successfully migrating data, edit histories, archives and identities, and you're looking at a very big lift. So long as American tech bosses kept their unshittificatory gambits to a measured slow flow, they could keep the pain beneath the threshold where it was worth us boiling frogs leaping Out of their pot. But the most important force defending American internet hegemony was free trade. Specifically, the U.S. Forced all its trading partners to adopt anti-circumvention laws that make it illegal to modify U.S. Tech exports. That means that you can't go into business selling your neighbors the tools to use generic ink or an independent app store, much less make a fortune exporting those tools to the rest Of the world. Enter Comrade Trump. When Trump started weaponizing U.S. Tech platforms to take away the working files, email accounts, and cloud calendars of judges who pissed him off by sentencing Bolsonaro to prison and by swearing out a genocide warrant For Netanyahu, he put the whole world on notice that he could shut down their governments, judiciaries, or companies at the click of a mouse. And of course, he's whacked the whole world with tariffs that violate the trade agreements that impose the anti-circumvention obligations that protect America's defective tech Exports. Now there's no longer any reason to keep those laws on the books. Happy Liberation Day, everyone. The post-American internet is at hand. ([Time 0:14:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/33afbc25-d0b4-48a1-b714-38fe61e8460c)) - **Trumpism Catalyzed A Leftward Shift In Democratic Politics** - Trump inadvertently radicalized Democratic politics and empowered leftward primary challenges. - Fury over Trumpismo pushed radical Dems and socialists to win primaries and forced elite Democrats toward billionaire taxes and tougher accountability. Transcript: Cory Doctorow But Trump has even more praxis up his spray tan stained sleeves. Trump is succeeding where Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and AOC failed. He's making the case for Democrats to defenestrate their useless, sellout, Epstein-poisoned leaders. All across the country, radical Dems and avowed socialists are sweeping primaries in elections, voters realize that blue no matter who will doom them to eternal torment in the mansion Cinematic universe. Fury over Trumpismo is pushing even the most useless Democratic leaders to sign up for billionaire taxes. Thanks to comrade Trump, the median Democratic voter will no longer be satisfied with kente cloth photo ops and little ping pong paddles stenciled with down with this sort of thing. Thanks to Trump, we might see criminal prosecutions and a primary challenge for any dem that gets in the way of a serious Nuremberg style reckoning with Trumpismo and its gangsters. All things being equal, I would have preferred that Trump had keeled over from a mid-burger stroke on the campaign trail in 2016. But when life gives you SARS, you make SARS-CoV This is a deeply shitty timeline, but Comrade Trump keeps tripping over his red tie. ([Time 0:16:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a5636b0d-a43e-421e-8c81-fbc21e4543fb))