The Hill: China's surging innovation investments are a wake-up call to Congress

[Caribbeans]

Visitors are attending the 2024 Beijing International Hydrogen Energy Technology and Equipment Exhibition at the China International Exhibition Center in Beijing, March 25, 2024. (Costfoto/NurPhoto/Getty Images)

China’s surging innovation investments are a wake-up call to Congress

The Hill | DAVID KAPPOS & ANDREI IANCU | 03/27/24

Beijing is accelerating its investments in science and technology. Its latest moves should be a wake-up call for lawmakers.

China’s government just announced a staggering $52 billion investment in research and development for 2024 — a 10 percent surge over the previous year. In a telling sign of priorities, science and technology funding saw the largest percentage increase of any major area of Chinese government spending — outpacing diplomacy, education and even the military.

As China’s President Xi Jinping once declared, “We must regard science and technology as our primary productive force.” He’s now making good on that pledge. A 2023 study bankrolled by the U.S. State Department found that China has vaulted to the top of the global leaderboard in critical fields like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics and biotechnology. And China has become the top worldwide recipient of patents, receiving more than double than the U.S.

China understands that its economic and geopolitical future depends on winning the 21st-century innovation race.

Yet America’s congressional leaders seem content to coast on the breakthroughs of the past, even as our competitiveness declines.

Consider the findings of the newly-released C4IP Congressional Innovation Scorecard, which grades every member of Congress based on voting records, bill sponsorship, and public advocacy efforts related to advancing U.S. innovation. The results paint a picture of indifference, complacency and neglect: Nearly 70 percent of members of Congress received a grade of “C” or “C-,” indicating “only a passing interest” in policies to strengthen U.S. intellectual property (IP) protections, which are crucial to cutting-edge innovation.

This is simply an abdication of responsibility...more
https://thehill.com/opinion/4557607-chinas-surging-innovation-investments-are-a-wake-up-call-to-congress/

The US is Rome all over again. Americans in the last few decades have a difficult time learning from history, throwing trillion$ at global hegemony while the nation sinks into the abyss.

The Romans of 59 bc were unaware they lived in a period now known as the “Late Roman Republic.” The same will be true of whatever time historians of the future refer to as the “Late American Republic.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/11/03/donald-trump-julius-caesar-433956

[Midnight Writer]

1. Innovation? We should own this.

If we can spend trillions on Reagan's Star Wars Missile Defense boondoggle, we can out-invest anybody in science and technology.

The whole problem is that the monied interests in the US are profiting handsomely from the old, outdated tech and are loath to replace it.

And in the USA, thems whats got the money call the shots. And thems whats got the most money are mainly old, greedy, selfish, rich people.

Money is speech, money is influence, money is power. We have concentrated our wealth and power into a small fraction of the population and monetary decisions tend to be based on selfishness rather than altruism or national interests or visions of a prosperous future for the country.

[Caribbeans]

2. Americans did great

until this kind of thinking destroyed it

https://web.archive.org/web/20030524095520/http://newamericancentury.org/

Around 30 years literally thrown away, enemies made and now there's real competition - quite a difference

Then : Good

Now: Bad

[brush]

3. Oh, boy. And we've got idiots like big mouthed, power-hungry MTG...

threatening to take down maga-religious Speaker Johnson if he so much as utters the work Ukraine, as if isolating us from international issues and letting Putin take over Ukraine will make us stronger. It'll just make our allies wary of ever trusting us again, those in Europe and the Asian geosphere where China's innovation prowess is leaving us in the dust.

We're at a huge disadvantage when a single, dim-bulb Congresswomen, probably with Russian ties, exerts so much influence on our foreign policy. And she's also a trumper, the whole other can worms that's making our future as a democratic nation hinging on an election that our judicial and court systems seem to have thrumbs on the scale to favor a deranged criminal defendant and senile-adjacent wannabe dictator.

I still have faith in Democrats and Independents cavalry troops coming over the hill to rescue us in Nov. It's gonna be tight though, but things are picking upl

[NNadir]

4. Coal isn't innovative; it's reactionary.

I just noted, with disgust, how the Chinese make hydrogen, as reported not by cheap marketeers of the fossil fuel industry, but in one of the world's most important scientific environmental journals, Environmental Science and Technology

It's right here in undeniable black and white that Chinese coal is the core of their very, very, very, very dirty Chinese hydrogen industry.

I'll repeat the reference and the reality that I just posted in response to marketing Chinese coal here:

Subsidizing Grid-Based Electrolytic Hydrogen Will Increase Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Coal Dominated Power Systems Liqun Peng, Yang Guo, Shangwei Liu, Gang He, and Denise L. Mauzerall Environmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (12), 5187-5195

The text is clear enough.

From the introductory text:

... Currently, nearly all hydrogen in China is either produced directly from fossil fuels (55% from coal gasification and 14% from steam methane reforming (SMR)) or as a byproduct of petroleum refining (28%), with only 1% coming from water electrolysis. (2) Producing 1 kg of coal- or SMR-based hydrogen emits roughly 19 and 10 kg of CO2, respectively. (3) In 2020, hydrogen production from fossil fuels in China emitted ?322Tg of CO2, equivalent to 25% of total CO2 emissions from industrial processes, a number expected to rise with increasing hydrogen demand. (4) Industrial processes include production of nonmetallic mineral products, chemical, and metal products, as well as production and consumption of halocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride. (4)

.

The bold, italics and underlining is mine.

EST: Chinese Hydrogen Production Is Making Climate Change Worse.

One thing that's very clear about the fossil fuel promotional advertising here, that rebranding fossil fuels as hydrogen, whether by bots or by fossil fuel salespeople, is that they lack a sense of decency and as well, a sense of shame.

The lie at this point, with carbon dioxide concentrations having risen by nearly 25 ppm in ten years is unconscionable, this more than four decades then, 2014, five decades now as of 2024, of people handing out the wholly dishonest "green hydrogen" lie..

Here's what fossil fuel sales people hawking hydrogen, just like they hawk "sequestration," have brought us:

Week beginning on March 24, 2024: 425.04 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 421.50 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 400.49 ppm
Last updated: March 31, 2024

The planet is in flames and the "bait and switch" bullshit about hydrogen has done nothing but to exacerbate the crisis. Although the marketing may take in a set of uneducated rubes, the reality is unchanged.

Volume 1, Issue 1, of The International Journal of Hydrogen Energy was published in 1976, when the concentration of dangerous fossil fuel waste in the planetary atmosphere averaged 332 ppm.

Lies and frauds like this have brought us nothing beyond a nearly 100 ppm increase in the concentrations of dangerous fossil fuel waste in the planetary atmosphere, leaving the planet in flames. I note that China depends, for its water supply, on the Himalayan glaciers, which are rapidly being degraded, and things like selling the hydrogen lie to promote coal is threatening China's future.

There's nothing "innovative" in this tiresome old failed scam. It's a dangerous fraud being advertised to promote the use of dangerous fossil fuels, killing the planet.

No sense of decency, none.