Lessons for the U.S. in 'China’s quest to engineer the future'

On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti

WBUR

Talk Show, Daily News, News, Npr, On Point, Daily

4.2 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How can a lawyerly society and an engineering society learn from each other? And what’s at stake if they fail? Author Dan Wang set out to answer those questions about the U.S. and China.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for WBUR comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design.
0:09.0	MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science.
0:13.6	Learn more at MathWorks.com.
0:16.3	Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at B.U. Questrum School of
0:23.4	Business that asks the thorny questions necessary for this moment. Follow Is Business Broken and stay
0:29.7	tuned for new episodes this fall. WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
0:44.1	This is On Point. I'm Megynchakrabardi.
0:46.3	Let's go back to 2001.
0:52.3	A lot happened that year, of course, including something that at the time probably didn't garner as much attention as it later would.
0:55.8	2001 was the year that the U.S.'s first ever proposed offshore wind farm applied for a
1:02.7	construction permit with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The proposed wind farm would have
1:08.4	130 wind turbines across 24 acres of federal water off the coast of
1:13.2	Massachusetts. The project would generate 454 megawatts of energy. It would power up to 400,000 homes.
1:22.3	It took eight years, but by 2009, the project had won local and state approval. And by then, it was known as Cape Wind. In 2010, the federal government gave the project its nod, and construction was slated to begin the next year. Well, that didn't happen.
1:42.3	Cape Wind got tangled up in a mess of lawsuits.
1:46.1	More than 25 of them by 2015 had been filed, and two years later, in 2017, Cape Wins' developers
1:53.3	abandoned the project.
1:55.8	The long chain of litigation had led to significant financial setbacks, and the project just wasn't feasible anymore.
2:03.3	More than $100 million in private investment torched. A couple of billion dollars in promised
2:09.7	investment banished. 17 years of effort and opposition had led to not one single wind turbine.
2:20.3	Meanwhile, over in China, in 2023 a mere six years after Cape Wind made its exit,
2:29.3	China constructed two-thirds of the entire world's wind and solar plants.
	...

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