


President Joe Biden’s hawkish approach to China risks jeopardizing his green agenda.
Two of Biden’s top priorities, transitioning the United States to green energy and combating China, may be mutually exclusive, experts warn, due to the Asian country’s near monopoly on key green energy materials. Recent and planned economic moves against China by the Biden administration may make his green ambitions untenable.
Andrew Gier, an energy-practice director at Capstone, told the Wall Street Journal that the Biden administration is “trying to strike a balance there between [its clean-energy goals and support of domestic manufacturing], and they’re at odds with each other in a lot of ways.”
According to the International Energy Agency, China hosts roughly 80% of solar manufacturing capacity and 75% of battery production. Despite a $114 billion investment in green technology through the Inflation Reduction Act, the U.S. will remain largely reliant on China for the foreseeable future.
A spokesperson for the green-energy lobby group American Clean Power told the outlet that the U.S. hasn’t even begun production of solar cells and will not be able to satisfy domestic demand for at least another decade.
Producers who are attempting to shift production to the U.S. complain that China and other Asian companies are undercutting them by flooding the market with artificially low-priced solar panels and cells. Hal Connolly, vice president of public policy and government relations at Qcells, a South Korean solar panel producer that opened a plant in the U.S., complained that due to the practice, the company is “losing millions of dollars per month.”
To counter Beijing’s dominance, the Biden administration has put tariffs on Chinese green goods and undertaken other economic moves to level the playing field. Doing so will also shoot up the prices of green technology, threatening the administration’s ability to reach its ambitious green goals.
The Biden administration countered this accusation, insisting that there is no trade-off involved.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“There has not been a trade-off,” Ali Zaidi, Biden’s national climate adviser, told the Wall Street Journal. Instead, the policies have spurred investments that “build out not just deployment of solar but manufacturing of solar here in the United States.”
He insisted that the moves would diversify supply chains, and make green energy even more accessible in the future.