Hello from your former newsletter anchor. It’s been a minute. I want to tell you about what I learned in Brazil.
For more than a century, cars, powered by gasoline, have been central to American power in the world. But the race to build the cars of the future is beginning to turn to China’s favor. Those cars are powered by batteries.
It’s part of one of the most consequential shifts happening in the world today. So I went to Brazil earlier this year to find out more.
Why Brazil? Because Brazil is Latin America’s largest economy, and the world’s sixth largest car market. Brazilians love cars and for many years, American automakers made cars in Brazil. Ford once built a Model T in its Brazilian factory. European car companies set up factories too, followed later by Japanese and Korean brands. And the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, wants to bring down climate emissions from its transportation sector.
Over the last few years, Chinese carmakers had been shipping lots of cars to Brazil. They are cheaper than many American and European models, they drive well and they are popular with Brazilians.
Brazil and the cars of the future
All of that alarmed legacy carmakers in Brazil and, in turn, the Brazilian government. The government wanted these battery-powered cars of the future, but it also wanted to have a piece of the value chain. So Brazil announced a new policy: If you want access to our market, build cars here.
“We don’t want to be an importer of technologies produced in other countries only,” Rafael Dubeux, a government official told me when I spoke to him in the capital, Brasília. “We also want to take advantage of this profound change in the world.”
There was one catch: Brazil produces a lot of ethanol from its vast sugar beet plantations. The ethanol industry is powerful, so much so that Brazilian law requires every liter of gas to contain a little more than 25 percent ethanol.
So instead of making purely electric cars, Chinese carmakers adjusted. They are building mostly plug-in hybrids in Brazil, which could accommodate ethanol.
Brazilian car dealerships are a total party on Saturday afternoons, with D.J.s and disco lights and a table of free food to lure potential buyers. I went to a few dealerships in São Paulo, drove around with several prospective buyers checking out Chinese E.V.s and hybrids, visited the Great Wall Motor Company factory that’s set to open in August. I also interviewed Chinese auto company executives, as well as Brazilian government officials and Brazilian union leaders.
The Chinese carmaker, BYD, has been accused by Brazilian prosecutors of violating Brazilian labor laws by keeping its Chinese workers in “conditions akin to slavery.” The company denies the charges.
China’s global ambitions
Chinese E.V.s aren’t allowed to be sold in the United States. For Chinese carmakers, that leaves the rest of the world.
This has been clear to me on my recent travels. In Milan’s Piazza Duomo, I saw an enormous dealership of BYD (short for Build Your Dreams). In Delhi, I saw many BYD luxury sedans, and this surprised me, because India and China are rivals in the region. There are Chinese car dealerships in Mexico City and London. Chinese carmakers have built factories in Turkey, Thailand, Russia, Hungary, and Indonesia.
It’s part of a major Chinese flex in shaping the global energy system. It already controls the global supply chain, in part because the government in Beijing has for years supported its carmakers. China dominates the key ingredients that go into these new cars. The batteries are all made in China, the minerals that go into the batteries are processed in China, and it also controls many of the mines from where they are extracted.
American lawmakers aren’t the only ones concerned about competition from Chinese companies. European Union officials have imposed high tariffs on Chinese car imports, and yet, Chinese brands now account for roughly 20 percent of Europe’s E.V. market, and E.U. lawmakers have accused China of flooding its market.
The E.U. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is scheduled to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping Beijing this week, in an effort to mend relations between the European bloc and China. One of the main topics on the agenda are tariffs on E.V.s. Cars are crucial to geopolitics. They always have been.
Here’s the article from Brazil. It’s part of our series, called Power Moves, on China’s drive to reshape the global system and how that affects the rest of the world. (Read the first installment of the series here.)
Regulation
A seabed-mining firm faces legal questions over controversial Trump policy
Two months ago, President Trump took an extraordinary step toward issuing permits to mine vast tracts of the ocean floor in international waters where valuable minerals are abundant.
It was a boon to The Metals Company, a start-up that had already spent more than half a billion dollars preparing to become the world’s first commercial seabed miner. Within days of Trump’s executive order, the company submitted its application to the federal government.
As a result, some of the company’s international partners are now questioning their relationships with The Metals Company.
The issue with The Metals Company’s seabed-mining plans is that nearly every country in the world, except the United States, has signed a longstanding treaty known as the Law of the Sea treaty.
Its language is clear: Mining in areas outside a country’s territorial waters before nations agree on how to handle the practice is not just a breach of international law, but it is also an affront to “the common heritage of mankind.” — Max Bearak
Climate law
An ancient law could shape the modern future of America’s beaches
If you go to a beach this summer, you might end up sunbathing in disputed territory. That’s partly because of climate change and partly because of a legal principle from the Roman Empire.
Most beaches have a natural defense against rising seas: The sandy area simply moves landward. But when property owners install sea walls or other barriers to protect beachfront homes and other buildings, the beach has nowhere to go. So it vanishes underwater.
Geologists call it coastal squeeze. It’s not a new problem, but it’s been accelerating recently as climate change causes sea levels to rise. And that’s prompting urgent questions about how coastal landscapes should be managed. — Cornelia Dean
By the numbers
More than 78 million
That’s the number of acres of forests that burned globally in 2023 and 2024, which was at least two times greater than the annual average of the previous nearly two decades, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Extreme forest-fire years are becoming more common because of climate change, the research suggests. As one researcher put it, “climate change is loading the dice for extreme fire seasons.”
The researchers used imagery from the LANDSAT satellite network to determine how tree cover had changed from 2002 to 2024, and compared that with satellite detections of fire activity to see how much canopy loss was because of fire. — Rebecca Dzombak
More climate news from around the web:
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China’s exports of clean energy technology reduced global emissions outside of China by 1 percent last year, according to an analysis by Carbon Brief.
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“A company backed by fossil fuel giants and the Norwegian government has built the world’s first carbon shipping port here,” The Washington Post writes, “with the aim of creating a dumping ground for Europe’s planet-warming pollution.”
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CNN reports that Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, has pleaded with President Trump to stop cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and make the U.S. a leader in weather forecasting.
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Somini Sengupta is the international climate reporter on the Times climate team.
The post Chinese Cars, Brazil Style appeared first on New York Times.
