Bill McKibben Sees Trouble Ahead For Tesla & Big Oil

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Dedicated climate activist Bill McKibben in a post on Substack suggested that Tesla and Big Oil have a common weakness. He says both are way behind the technological curve. The proof? The announcement a few days ago by BYD that it has developed a battery for an electric car that can be recharged in just five minutes. The cars with the new battery technology will start at under $30,000 in China. What that means, he says, is that the last good reason not to drive an electric car has disappeared because an EV can now be recharged as quickly as a conventional car can be refueled.

McKibben takes no prisoners as he describes how this happened. He wrote, “BYD did not waste its time giving Nazi salutes. It didn’t buy a social media platform so it could make obscure marijuana jokes and make fun of poor people. It didn’t devote itself to helping a nincompoop win the presidency and then decide it would be exhilarating fun to fire a bunch of government workers. Instead, BYD did, you know, engineering.” In fact, BYD founder Wang Chuanfu has said that his company employs 150,000 engineers, which is how advances in battery technology happen. In addition, the company has unveiled a new electric motor that has nearly 800 horsepower and spins up to 31,000 RPM.

McKibben goes on to say, “It must sting for Musk to watch that kind of progress, especially on a week when he had to recall all 46,000 Tesla Cybertrucks (and thus disclose for the first time that he has only sold 46,000 of the stainless steel beasts) in order to keep them from dropping parts on the road. It turns out Tesla had stuck the trim on with the wrong glue. Now they’re going to replace it with an adhesive that is ‘not prone to environmental embrittlement.’ When Tesla owners drive their sad vehicles back to the dealers for repairs, they will likely encounter one of the hundreds of protests that have broken out across the country,” he said.

Dan Ives is the managing director of Wedbush Securities and one the largest Tesla shareholders. Last week, he suggested Musk might want to actually go back to working at Tesla since he has managed to halve the value of his company so far this year while parading about with his chainsaw at CPAC events and such. This week, Musk gathered Tesla workers for a pep talk, in which he told them that Tesla robotaxis are coming soon. “As they have been since 2016!” McKibben pointed out.

Demand For Gasoline Falling In China

If the BYD announcement was a reminder that Musk is a poseur, the deeper threat probably is for Big Oil, McKibben claims. If you can put 400 kilometers worth of electricity in a car in five minutes, it feels like the writing is on the wall. Chinese demand for gasoline dropped in 2024, and analysts see it going down almost 5% a year between now and 2030.

As the International Energy Agency explained last week, “Electric vehicles currently account for about half of car sales in China, undercutting 3.5% of new fuel demand in 2024…. China has been providing subsidy support to purchases of so-called “new energy vehicles” (NEVs) since 2009, promoting its automotive manufacturing industry, and reducing air pollution. A trade-in policy, introduced in April 2024 and expanded in 2025, continues to drive growth in China’s EV sales. Meanwhile, highly competitive Chinese automakers are also making gains in international markets.”

On March 5, 2025, Bloomberg reported that China is pushing its oil refiners to reduce fuel output, raising new questions about demand in the largest importing nation just as the world’s drillers need buyers for the extra barrels they are adding to the market. The country’s top economic planner wants the industry to cut production of refined petroleum products and increase output of chemicals, according to its annual work report at the National People’s Congress on Wednesday.

Top refiner Sinopec Group said earlier in the week that consumption of both diesel and gasoline has peaked, leaving petrochemicals as the major growth driver for demand. China’s continuing embrace of electric and electrified vehicles means gasoline consumption probably peaked in 2023, according to Sinopec. Sales of the fuel averaged 13.2 million tons a month last year, down 9% from 2023 levels, according to data from industry consultant JLC International Ltd.

McKibben says that in the US, oil companies decided they could make more money from fossil fuel than from embracing renewables. They decided to let the Chinese win the solar energy battle, reckoning that they can use their political power to keep the world hooked on hydrocarbons for decades. In some ways, it’s working — they helped buy Trump his presidency and he’s giving them what they want. In particular, he’s been shaking down foreign countries to buy more LNG to avoid tariffs. If it was anyone but the Grifter in Chief, that would be seen as criminal behavior, but because he has been given total immunity by the solons on the US Supreme Court, it is just business as usual.

Supply & Demand

Oil is a global commodity, McKibben points out, which makes it the perfect example of marginal pricing. If China uses less gasoline, then the price of oil is going to drop. That’s bad news for American producers, as Trump’s biggest industry fundraiser, Harold Hamm, explained recently. He said the US shale industry needs much higher oil prices than $50 per barrel, and even higher than the current WTI Crude price, which is in the high $60s. He told Bloomberg last week, “There are a lot of fields that are getting to the point that’s real tough to keep that cost of supply down.” The fracking revolution is winding down. Wells are getting depleted faster than expected, and if prices are depressed it will make less economic sense to “drill, baby, drill,” no matter what the American Ayatollah demands.

“I’m beginning to think you can imagine a world where the US builds tariff walls around its borders, prevents the easy development and spread of technology like EVs and heat pumps, and manages to become an island of internal combustion on an increasingly electrified world. That’s a depressing vision, though nowhere near as depressing as imposing that vision on the rest of the world. If you were any other country (Canada, for instance) would you tie yourself to the US for any critical product if you had a choice? And everyone has a choice, because the sun shines and the wind blows everywhere.”

Chinese authorities are pulling back on a plan to let BYD build a new car plant in Mexico. Why? Because they’re afraid that people like Musk — an unimaginative pol, not an engineering genius — will steal their cool new tech. What a delicious irony that would be. Twenty years ago, American manufacturers were rushing to set up factories in China, which led to a technology transfer to their Chinese joint venture partners. Now the flow of technological expertise could flow in the opposite direction — something no one ever thought was remotely possible previously.

The US can build its tariff walls and sit in splendid isolation from the rest of the world, but that does not bode well for economic growth. America was happy to be the technology leader for the world when it suited its convenience, but now it wants to crawl into a corner and suck its thumb because the game has changed. What a miserable epitaph for a once great nation. As Robert Frost wrote in his poem Mending Wall, “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out.” Walls have two sides, a concept the Moron of Mar-A-Loco is incapable of grasping.