The White House’s Green Trade War Is Just Getting Started
The desire to disentangle the US from dependency on China is bipartisan. Biden’s clean tech tariffs are only one piece of the puzzle.
The White House is balancing between cutting emissions and cutting supply chains.
Photographer: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images North AmericaIn one of those great rug-pulls in which the cosmos seems to specialize, the world got a taste for decarbonization just as it lost its taste for globalization. President Joe Biden’s new set of tariffs on a slate of Chinese clean tech exports, among others, is the latest shot fired in a gathering green trade war. There’s a degree of theater involved — US elections are less than six months away — but don’t mistake that for inconsequence.
The most eye-catching tariff increases are reserved for those goods about which the vast majority of US consumers, and Chinese manufacturers, will care the least. Taking the rate on Chinese electric vehicles from 27.5% to 102.5% sounds catastrophic until you remember that, by value, China exports more EVs to Russia than the US, which took just 1% last year. That was roughly 12,000 out of total sales in the US of 1.4 million EVs. Likewise, jacking up tariffs on Chinese solar cells — of which the US took all of 0.2% of exports last year — is a bit like me threatening to curb my purchases of Ferraris.