President Biden wants more American cars and trucks to run on electricity, not gas. His administration has advanced that goal on several fronts, including tough new auto emissions rules and generous new subsidies to help American consumers save up to $7,500 on the cost of a new electric vehicle.
Mr Biden’s advisers agree that electric vehicles – which sell for more than $53,000 on average in the United States – would sell even faster here if they were cheaper. In fact, there is a wave of new electric vehicles that are significantly cheaper than what customers can currently buy in the US. They are very popular in Europe.
But the president and his team don’t want Americans to buy these cheap cars that sell elsewhere for as little as $10,000 because they are made in China. That’s true, although a surge in low-cost imported electric vehicles could help drive down car prices overall, potentially helping Mr. Biden in his re-election campaign at a time when inflation remains voters’ top economic concern.
Instead, the president is taking steps to make Chinese electric vehicles prohibitively expensive, primarily to protect American automakers. Mr. Biden signed an executive action earlier this month quadrupling tariffs on those cars to 100 percent.
These tariffs will put many potential Chinese imports at a significant cost disadvantage compared to American-made electric vehicles. But some models, like the discount BYD Seagull, could still cost less than some American competitors even after tariffs, which is one reason why Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and some other Democrats have called on Mr. Biden to ban Chinese electric imports entirely to disallow.
The apparent conflict between climate concerns and American manufacturing has angered some environmentalists and liberal economists who say the country and the world would be better off if Mr. Biden embraced imports of low-cost, low-emission technologies to combat climate change.
Mr Biden and his staff reject this criticism. They say the president’s efforts to restrict Chinese electric cars and other clean technology imports are an important counterpoint to Beijing’s illegal and harmful trade practices.
And they insist Mr Biden’s approach to trade will ultimately benefit American jobs and national security – along with the planet.
Here are the political and policy considerations underlying Mr. Biden’s attempt to protect American producers from Chinese competition.
Deny Beijing a new monopoly
China already dominates key clean energy production areas in areas such as solar cells and batteries. Mr. Biden’s advisers want to prevent the company from gaining monopolies in industries similar to electric vehicles for several reasons.
These include climate concerns. Government officials say Chinese factories, which tend to run on fossil fuels like coal, produce more greenhouse gas emissions than American factories.
There is also a key economic reason to deny China a monopoly: ensuring that electric cars and trucks are always available at competitive prices. The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the fragility of global supply chains, as critical products such as semiconductors from China and other Asian countries that the United States relied on became difficult to obtain. Prices of consumer electronics and other products based on imported materials skyrocketed, fueling inflation.
Biden officials want to avoid a similar scenario for electric vehicles. Concentrating the supply of electric vehicles and other advanced green technologies in China would “threaten the world’s collective ability to have access to the technologies we need to thrive in a clean energy economy,” said Ali Zaidi, the national climate adviser from Mr. Biden.
Strengthening national security
Biden officials say they are not trying to bring the entire global electric vehicle supply chain to the United States. They are striking deals with allies to supply minerals for advanced batteries, for example, and encouraging countries in Europe and elsewhere to subsidize their own domestic clean-tech production. But they are particularly concerned about the security implications of having a major rival like China dominate the space.
The government has launched investigations into the risks of software and hardware from future imported smart cars – electric or not – from China that could track Americans’ locations and report them to Beijing. Liberal economists also fear that China could block access to new cars or key components for strategic reasons.
Allowing China to dominate electric vehicle production risks repeating the long-standing economic and safety challenges of gasoline-powered cars, said Elizabeth Pancotti, director of special initiatives at the liberal Roosevelt Institute in Washington, which oversees industrial policy efforts welcomed Mr. Biden.
Americans have struggled for decades to cope with decisions by often hostile oil-producing nations operating as part of the OPEC cartel to cut production and raise gasoline prices. China could wreak similar havoc on the electric car market if it pushes other nations out of business, she said.
If that happens, she said, “it’s going to be really difficult to undo that.”
Biden needs the energy transition to create jobs
There is no denying that politics also plays a large role in Mr. Biden’s decisions. Simply put, he promises that his climate program will create jobs – well-paying blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, including in key swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Mr. Biden is a staunch supporter of organized labor and is counting on union votes to win these states. He has promised that the energy transition will give a boost to unionized workers. He expects their support for tariffs designed to protect jobs in American manufacturing will overshadow any complaints from environmentalists who want faster progress on emissions reductions.
“One of the constituent groups in the Democratic Party that is really well organized and gets people knocking on doors is the labor movement, even more so than the environmental movement,” Todd Vachon, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University, told the author from “Clean Air and Good Jobs: US Labor and the Struggle for Climate Justice.”
These concerns have become particularly clear because many clean energy jobs are at young companies where workers are not unionized, he added.
Mr. Biden put those concerns front and center when he announced his tariff decision last week.
“When cheap steel from China began flooding the market in 2000, U.S. steel cities in Pennsylvania and Ohio were hit hard,” he said at the White House. “Iron and steel workers in Pennsylvania and Ohio have lost their jobs. I won’t let this happen again.”
David Gelles contributed reporting from New York.
Source link
2024-05-27 22:36:21
www.nytimes.com
