The U.S. will impose duties on solar equipment and washing machines made abroad
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
And, if these tariffs stand, the US will be at a 30% cost disadvantage in all of these areas, until at least two or three years after the tariffs end, perhaps as long as ten years. This will be a crippling disadvantage for US economic development; entrepreneurs in these industries will wisely avoid investment in the US.
Edit: the actual ruling is https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/files/Press/fs/201%20Ca... and the tariff is 30% in year 1, 25% in year 2, 20% in year 3, and 15% in year 4. So it doesn't quite reach the mid-2020s when photovoltaic installation really skyrockets, but it seems likely that this tariff will be renewed and extended.
Edit: I added a comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16209749 with calculations about the physical size of the panels needed for the energy-source transition.
† I say this advisedly. I am well aware the Trump Administration has withdrawn from the Paris Accords; nearly started a second nuclear war, this one with North Korea; implemented a Muslim travel ban; and officially withdrawn from the TPP, although that was almost dead already. I am seriously arguing that handicapping the US economy in this way is at least as significant as these.
Trump is just trying to hurt solar, because he is paid by the dying coal industry. But he can't stop the inevitable, maybe slow it down slightly.
China's banking system is loaning scads of money to solar manufacturers while in the US the banking system has loaned $1T to fracking, oil and gas companies.
But the Soviet Union is gone. The neoliberal transformation of Russia is a utter failure. The fossil fuel industry is walking dead at this point do to solar, wind, electrified transportation and the imperative to deal with global warming.
It's a classic people and organizations looking out for their short term interest + risk aversion leads to eventual catastrophe.
And as I mentioned, countries whose leadership have no particular interest in legacy cold war real politik or the Wests fossil fuel hegemony[1] are going to move and move fast.
[1] Other countries leaders absolutely despise being beholden to the oil/gas/fossil fuel industry.
That is untrue, President Obama hated fracking and did much to discourage it.
Maybe he said he hated it. I am not sure about the "did much to discourage" part.
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2016/...
---
The fracks occurred in at least 630 different wells off the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama (see interactive map), and many took place in critical habitat for imperiled loggerhead sea turtles. Oil companies were also allowed to dump about 76 billion gallons of waste fluid into Gulf waters in 2014.
---
Not only that, his administration approve fracking with no site-specific analysis of the threats to the environment and also without public involvement.
He tried and got struck down. He did what he could without Congress to help.
This problem is also magnified by the fact that Warren Buffet has been using his influence to encourage states to charge panel owners fees relating to grid usage that weren't there prior, as there is a cost associated with continuously switching which direction power from a given houses is flowing.
Reeks of "Trump is for it so it's must be bad" issue that has plagued journalism since he took office.
There's pros and cons to this method of fighting dumping but it's certainly a good thing for American solar panel manufacturers just not the installers (in the short term at least).
What's backing up this claim? Because not only is this at a glance in violation of several trade agreements the U.S. has made internationally, it also defies core theories and principles that have fueled the last several decades of trade law and agreements [1].
This absolutely REEKS of the typical bullshit the right+ in this country like to put out every time they're elected while also dripping with short sighted protectionism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_United_States_histo...
Trump can definitely cause the inevitable to leave the US playing catch-up in the 2030s, unless he's out of office soon.
If you want a coal-related motive, try the obvious: Pennsylvania is an important swing state. Mines are hiring again, for both miners and engineers.
The Emma Maersk carries 11000 TEUs on every voyage, so the amount of solar panels that will be installed worldwide in 2018 is about 6 shiploads.
What about the future, when photovoltaic becomes the dominant source of marketed energy? According to the IEO, current total world marketed energy consumption is 20 terawatts (20'000 gigawatts), which would amount to about 90 million TEUs, or 8000 shiploads. Call it 30000 shiploads to account for photovoltaic's low capacity factor, typically in the 20%–30% range (though we can expect that to become more efficient as development moves to more equatorial areas with less clouds).
There are currently about 9000 container ships in operation, so current world marketed energy consumption is about three trips for the world's shipping fleet, in the form of photovoltaic panels.
Total container shipping volume is already about 470 million TEUs per year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_ship#Container_ports
We can presumably expect panels to become smaller and lighter as time goes on, further decreasing the energy needed for shipping, and eventually the proliferation of solar panels will depress the price of energy so low that not even bunker fuel can compete with syngas, at which point the bunker fuel emissions problem will be over.
(Edited to correct order-of-magnitude calculation error.)
If that is the case, why would this not work for cargo ships as well?
Ship screws, on the other hand, can be designed to run at nearly any speed at all, and nearly all the time the ship is moving at exactly the same speed. So the screws are just coupled directly to the crankshaft of a two-stroke diesel engine the size of a fucking church which remains powered on for years at a time, always running at whatever speed it damn well pleases.
I don't think domestic solar panels are 30% more expensive than imports anyway, especially into the future with tax cuts, so the actual increase price paid is probably less.
This is a very exciting idea that never occurred to me. We always talk about the challenges facing solar regarding residential use. But a factory could schedule its operations for peak solar or even relocate entirely to places with reliable, consistent solar power. Very interesting.
For instance, I did some cursory analysis on building a chemical plant to do ammonia production in order to take advantage of the negative energy costs that were available in some parts of CA for hours a day thanks to a combination of the duck curve and the overcapacity at Oroville. When you're only running things 2-8 hours a day, you are amortizing the fixed costs over a much smaller output than something running constantly. Even getting paid several cents per kwh to take energy off the grid, it seemed hard to turn a profit.
I'm not posting in support of tariffs, I just don't see the connection between spending now (at today's panel prices and resultant kw-h/dollar) and lower future electricity prices.
Wind OTOH produces a lot of energy at night where demand is low and you can't really shutdown turbines - you must use the energy. Yet I'm not sure if it's feasible to run a plant in those conditions.
Aluminum pots are usually run off extremely consistent power sources like hydro. I'm not sure how much you have to redesign them to take effective advantage of unpredictable intermittent supplies.
Most large wind turbines have pitch control (Some newer turbines even have individual blade pitch control to counter asymmetric loads)
China subsidizes solar and nearly all US manufacturers have been forced to move plants to compete, declare bankruptcy or shutdown.
The question is: after China obtains a stronghold in this market... then what? The Chinese subsides will eventually be removed, and solar panels will return to their natural price--but with all of the supply chain, supplies for materials, r&d, knowhow, etc centralized in and around China.. making it hard for non-Chinese companies to compete.
So look further out--when China no longer subsidizes solar... is that good for the US economy?
As for the "natural price", the only significant irreducible cost to producing silicon photovoltaic panels is the price of energy itself. Everything else is either literally dirt cheap (silica, alumina, trace quantities of phosphorus) or can be amortized over arbitrarily large production volumes (giant molybdenum crucibles, FIB lithography machines, Ph.D. physicists). In the limit where solar panels are abundant, the "natural price" for solar panels is very nearly the price of the sand they are made from.
One could imagine instead that the US government competes with China by providing its own solar subsidies. Of course, the republicans would rather the price of solar go up and the government spend money on green energy subsidies...
But it’s clear that making the US competitive in solar isn’t the sole motivation here.
Incidentally, the "US manufacturers" supporting this tariff are owned by Chinese and German parent companies.
>"electrical energy will become dramatically cheaper starting in the mid-2020s, at least for diurnal uses. Consequently, the prices of goods produced by energy-intensive industries, such as aluminum and solar panels, will begin to drop precipitously, and new energy-intensive industries will become economically feasible, opening up vast new areas of the economy."
Not only will the tariffs halve in four years, photovoltaic prices will substantially drop in parallel. Better to give US manufacturers a chance to reach the promised land of solar you're predicting than allow them to crumble now.
There's some real world stuff that blunts this a bit. Oligarchs can capture more than their fair share of the benefits and not recompense the direct losers (e.g. people having to change jobs and retrain and the areas they live in).
And corporate interests can take advantage of the negotiations to enshrine in what is effectively global law things that benefit them, but are a net negative for the planet e.g overly strong IP protection.
People can still think they are good overall and that the energy should be focused on fixing the bad parts or mitigating the problems.
Trump on the other hand opted out of TPP and then said he wanted to make individual deals with the same countries. This fixes none of the problems I see with TPP, probably makes them worse in fact, so even if you hate trade deals he's not actually achieved anything but a minor delay.
>"The duties are lower than the 35 percent rate the U.S. International Trade Commission recommended in October after finding that imported panels were harming American manufacturers. The idea behind the tariffs is to raise the costs of cheap imports, particularly from Asia, and level the playing field for those who manufacture the parts domestically."
This is largely in support of American manufacturing. Of course it will harm the solar industry through increased prices, but Trump here is balancing an interest in solar with an interest in American industry.
I see it as a win for both sides. Dems get to put on show that they care about the planet. Trump gets to put on a show he’s saving the planet and American manufacturing.
Obama could’ve done the same? Actually he decided to lift a ban on Crude Oil exports. The oil from shale and fracking that flooded the markets in the past years.
Obama's admin was more tempered when it came to oil+gas+petrol+coal.
The admin increased exports, but it also restrained oil exploration in US waters (especially after Deepwater Horizon) and didn't open exploration to most of Alaska's National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) or just rubberstamp the Keystone XL pipeline (ironically the smaller Keystone pipeline had a fairly large spill the same week as the Trump admin approved the Keystone XL).
That's not to say that the Obama Admin was nearly as "anti-oil" as it was portrayed in conservative-biased news. They were remarkably accommodating when the cost-benefit analysis was positive for the country.
There's a lot of things to be said about Trump and economic protectionism, but saying it's entirely fueled by donor pressure is oversimplifying the situation.
Source, please? Given the absurd amount of corruption going on in the administration (i.e. the missing inaugural funds and Mar-a-lago vacations, to name just a tiny fraction) and Trump's own charities, I find the idea that he spent even a penny of his own money on his campaign laughable based on first principles. I haven't seen any evidence to the contrary, other than his own patently unreliable rhetoric.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/nov/...
"Trump received about $239 million from donors who gave less than $200 in total. That amounts to 69 percent of the Trump campaign’s individual contributions;
Hillary Clinton received about $137 million from $200-or-under donors. That made up 22 percent of the campaign’s individual contributions;"
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016...
"President-elect Donald Trump didn't need $100 million of his money to win the White House in the end.
Trump contributed another $10 million to his presidential campaign in the closing days of the election, bringing his total investment in the race to $66.1 million, new filings confirm."
[1] https://www.fec.gov/files/bulk-downloads/index.html?prefix=b... (I wasn't able to load indiv16.zip and analyze it but the total loan amount from the other data is a only few million shy of the $66 million total).
Everyone is subsidizing fossil fuel production. Most countries agreed a few years ago that they were doing so and promised to stop, but little progress has been made on that.
The IMF has some numbers here:
https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sonew0...
About 7% of global GDP in subsidies.
China is the highest by dollar amount, Ukraine highest per capita.
If solar eventually becomes an important source of power, the US would not want to be wholly reliant on a geopolitical rival for manufacturing expertise. This could thus be construed as a vote for the long-term dominance of solar as an energy source.
Unless it's also backed up with added incentives to manufacture solar in country. I predict that won't happen, and even if it did new plants of any significance would be 5-10 years out and in the meantime all we've done is shot ourselves in the foot.
Raising taxes isn't a big priority for him atm. Those pro-solar deductions are used by a great may companies.
No true Scotsman. One doesn't exclude the other. Perhaps this is even next on his list, who knows (lets not give him ideas wink)
I suspect the only real hold back of the administration is that it is understaffed to fully attack all of the solar programs effectively.
It's already clear that solar is only getting cheaper and more viable globally, this is a long term vote for maintaining our national security by guaranteeing that an entire industry can compete with foreign companies that are subsidized by their governments.
The correct response when someone who is sort of a competitor is selling you stuff below cost is probably to buy lots and lots of it.
I don't think Trump would have went for that solution tho, since he wants to kill EnergyStar: http://e360.yale.edu/features/killing-energy-star-a-popular-...
Except that quite a few of the cheaper Chinese-made solar panels have shorter lifetimes than the American-made ones did.
Consequently, installers have started getting burned because they are getting warranty claims much sooner than they should be. And, of course, the supplier of the Chinese panels is long gone. And most of the American suppliers have been driven out of business by the cheaper prices--which means the installers can't switch to more reliable panels.
Now, do I think Trump thought about any of this? Not even slightly.
However, because solar panels are durable goods (or perhaps you prefer "capital expense") the calculus is a bit more complicated than just "cheaper is gooder".
All of them specifically cited the Chinese flood with causing them to cash out.
They weren't prescient enough to predict the drop in actual reliability, but they could see very quickly that they were going to be the ones holding the bag on warranty claims with Chinese suppliers. And, if they didn't use Chinese suppliers, they couldn't compete on price. So, they just got out.
Solar Fabrication plants are being made in the USA, and from my understanding, we have higher-tech panels which reach higher levels of efficiency. If the solar manufacturing industry gets a boost in the US, then we can likely make them cheaper too, due to the scaling of mass production.
This is a nice read: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/reports/2017/0...
Quote: "The nation is on track to overdeliver on the emissions reduction commitments it put forward under the Paris climate agreement"
And: "Compared with the Chinese coal fleet, even the best U.S. plants are running older, less efficient technologies."
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=16271
Cleaner coal plants in China are still dirtier than natural gas plants in the US.
China greenhouse gas emissions per capita are less than half the USA's.[1]
1. https://wri.org/blog/2014/11/6-graphs-explain-world%E2%80%99...
China has 320 GW of installed hydro power, compared to 80 in the US.
China had 160 GW of installed wind power in 2016, compared to 80 in the US.
It could still make sense but I haven't seen a lot of the full rationale.
Also note that unless this is done within the WTO framework, it is likely to start/escalate (depending on your interpretation of previous events) a "trade war" (arms race of tariffs) which ultimately hurts the US consumer.
China will be selling to less of the rest of the world once the rest of the world stops allowing economic dumping from China.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-china-is-domi...
Of course the point is to put everyone else out of business or crippled so China can reap all the profits. It's a fairly common monopolistic tactic.
Solar panel manufacturers cried foul while China simply out-managed the US players on the supply chain, so the US slapped tariffs on Chinese finished panels. China says, ok, so that's how you want it, and then they slap tariffs on cheap US-manufactured polysilicon. Most Americans (and sadly, most American politicians) don't know that up until recently those cheap Chinese solar panels started life as gravel, coal, and wood chips in America's rust belt. And jobs. Well, not anymore. South Korea, not near as foolish as the Obama administration, and not subject to the same high retaliatory tariffs, is now taking over the lead position in polysilicon. They didn't even say thanks.
Let's tour a polysilicon plant near Moses Lake, WA. Whoops. Closed down a few years ago when they couldn't compete with other countries for China's voracious polysilicon appetite. Hemlock Semiconductor, once the largest polysilicon manufacturer in the world, is hemorrhaging jobs left and right in Michigan. Both Hemlock and Wacker announced huge new polysilicon plants in Tennessee, investing billions, then mothballing them before they hit production because Uncle Sam suckerpunched the US polysilicon industry by playing anticompetitive with the US solar panel industry.
This made sense to an extent when the Democrats were in charge, because US solar panel factories were in blue voting areas and US polysilicon factories and suppliers were in red voting areas. Now it's simple pandering and incompetence.
Be careful with labeling it "American manufacturing". We've lost our worldwide leadership position and while we may buy American more at home, the rest of the world is moving on without our dominance.
And US based cell manufacturing may indeed grow; Tesla is one driver, and JinkoSolar might be the next in line:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/01/22/jinkosolar-looks-to-s...
I have a little hope that this might also finally get Hanwha Q Cells and 1366 Technologies to launch a full-scale manufacturing partnership. I really like what 1366 has invented but if they wait years more to go industrial-scale they'll get their cost advantages erased by continued incremental improvements in traditional wafering.
These tariffs are not going to make American solar manufacturing dominate the global solar market. It might end up like with foreign automobile trade wars in the 1980s -- factories owned by overseas companies, but actual manufacturing operations in the US.
I'd prefer if we didn't go through several years of artificially elevated prices from these tariffs in the first place, but I think there's a decent chance it will actually lead to new American factories for cells and modules. Those plants will need to be bigger scale than past American facilities if they don't want to die as soon as the tariffs expire. Suniva's biggest problem IMO is that they were trying to manufacture in America at ~5% the scale of globally competitive manufacturers. They were unprofitable so they didn't scale up, and they didn't scale up because they were unprofitable.
I don't follow. Don't both scenarios wreak of pandering and incompetence?
The carrot approach would have bene to prop up companies like Solyndra. We know how that was received.
As simple example: the British supported the German chemicals industry prior to WWI.
At the start of WWI, the money the British spent had been turned into German chemical expertise. This lead to the development of the Haber process, poison gas, and generally making Germany a powerhouse in chemicals in the same way Britain was in mechanical manufacturing.
If a tariff had been put in place on German imports to Britain the German chemical industry would have been much smaller, with much less capability and WWI would have finished in 6 months because Germany would have run out of nitric acid for their explosives.
Another way to stop wars is to accept that somebody else is more economically productive and let the whole world benefit from that instead of trying to destroy it.
Economics is only allowed a free reign so long as it meets the goals of those currently in power in a given political unit.
Try selling nuclear technology to Iran if you don't think that it applies to the US as much as to China.
Doing it strategically to prevent a nuclear war 30 years down the line is the lesser of two evils.
* Manufacturing them at home is better for local workers and provides a straightforward path for dispaced workers from other plant work.
* Trying to compete on even terms with what is essentially slave labor overseas drags us all down.
* There is value in economic independence, especially when you're importing from a fairweather ally. You don't want to wipe out a local industry that you might need to lean on someday.
The reasons for having tarriffs are apparently obvious to everyone except economists.
* Innovate on automation.
* Then subsidize our industry, rather than tax imports. Taxing imports simply hurts the industry as a whole. Minnesota solar is a good case study [1]
1 http://midwestenergynews.com/2016/02/15/solar-job-growth-exp...
Because European know-how and industry, and thus competitive advantage, gets lost. I don't want a dictatorship like China having the massive amount of leverage it already has. China has brought European solar, steel and electronics production to its knees by a combination of slavery-backed price dumping, industrial espionage, knowledge-transfer extortions (aka "to do business in China you have to find a local partner and work with them") and outright buying of the shells of doomed European companies.
Especially the stranglehold China has over the West when it comes to electronics will bite the West more sooner than later.
By the way, China is doing a similar thing to Africa: with all the money the West gave to them for cheap electronics they're building (and thus taking operational control) rail and road infrastructure.
From Chinese perspective it's the perfect ultra long game... the rest of the world is in for a massive shock once they run afoul of Chinese goals wherever and whenever that might be.
No, and that's why I said "long game". For now, of course, African countries selling themselves out to China will profit - but the countries are, basically, binding their future on the goodwill of China. Just imagine the countries decide one day that they're done with cheap low quality China crap, that they want to incentivize local production or that they want to show solidarity with Tibet or Taiwan... say goodbye to your traffic infrastructure, that will be the Chinese response.
The West made Africa totally dependent on mitumba (cheap second-hand clothing that all but destroyed local textile industry) and other foreign aid (after all, Africa is a nice dumping ground for overproduced European milk and other food - do "something good" and keep European prices high at the same time), and the Chinese are doing the same with their money. Colonialism at its finest.
I'm not sure how you're proposing that would happen. Like ripping up roads? Or like, not renewing a contract for future repairs? And would that be different from the abandoned projects from NGO's?
> the Chinese are doing the same with their money. Colonialism at its finest.
I think there's some projection here... Although I grew up in the U.S., I've visited relatives frequently enough to come at this with a different perspective.
In Chinese culture (and perhaps some other cultures as well), there is a notion that nations that have economic ties with one another are highly disincentivized from going to war with each other. And also, that nations with hard infrastructure, such as roads, a stable power grid, and soft infrastructure, including high literacy rates, low rates of religion, and dual-income households being the norm, have the ability to grow their GDP more effectively, and less likely to give into religious fundamentalism, civil wars, and general unrest.
In American culture, I've heard it said that no two countries that both have a McDonalds would go to war with one another. So I don't think this is really so different.
> cheap low quality China crap
um... I'm not sure whether to call this conscious bias or unconscious bias. A lot of high quality products come out of China these days, and the last time I visited (in 2017), Shanghai seemed way more high tech than the SF Bay Area. One area in which there is a lack of talent is in brand marketing, and I'll explain what the problem is with two scenarios:
1) U.S. brand wants to get a particular product made. Gets quotes from X suppliers. Chooses the lowest cost estimate, which happens to cut corners, reinforcing the low image of Chinese exports.
2) Chinese manufacturers release their own products into a Chinese market. Manufacturers compete against each other for consumer preference, and high quality products are rewarded. That's where the good stuff is. Problem is, these companies don't tend to have a lot of in-house marketing talent for making the right kind of ads for the West, despite having lots of technical / manufacturing / design expertise.
One way, for example: Have only Chinese nationals operate the railway equipment or the dispatching. In case of conflict, forbid the personnel from working, order the personnel back home - or, in severe cases, to activate a hidden killswitch on the IT equipment (which can be done even from remote). A railroad network without a working dispatch is useless, dito for airports. In today's world where nothing operates without massive amounts of computers the unspoken threat alone is enough to coerce any country into doing what China wants.
> In Chinese culture (and perhaps some other cultures as well), there is a notion that nations that have economic ties with one another are highly disincentivized from going to war with each other. And also, that nations with hard infrastructure, such as roads, a stable power grid, and soft infrastructure, including high literacy rates, low rates of religion, and dual-income households being the norm, have the ability to grow their GDP more effectively, and less likely to give into religious fundamentalism, civil wars, and general unrest.
Indeed, indeed - and exactly this is what makes me afraid. Who is going to oppose China when they try to annex Taiwan for good? I'd be surprised if the US actually follows through on their decades of pledges to Taiwan. Or when they will turn into that massive monster of a surveillance state enabled by modern technology? When everyone has ties to China, China has leverage. (Just as the US has, yes, but at least the US are a democracy and bound to human rights at their core.)
> um... I'm not sure whether to call this conscious bias or unconscious bias.
Combination of both, I'd say - the "conscious bias" backed by countless stories of faked high-quality Western products ending up even in legitimate supply chains and sometimes endangering lives.
One privilege of starting a company in the U.S. is that people don't automatically assume your business practices are similar to Uber's, or Exxon, or pharma bro. And conversations about your products aren't derailed by 10-things-I-hate-about-(country) (e.g., was there another drone strike on a wedding?).
The problem is that whenever a Chinese company does good things, is completely reasonable, makes great progress, which is 99.99% of the time, it is either: 1) not covered because it's not news, or 2) somehow spun into OMG-China-is-ahead fear-mongering.
Why does this happen? China-bashing gets you eyeballs. As an acquaintance of mine has mentioned to me, she gets requests from Western journalists of OMG-Asian-guys-are-sexist article quotes all the time. When she wants to tell them the truth, they no longer want to get her quote. There's an army of those writers and they're all full time. It's their job to tell you how nice it is here and terrible over there even when they're not giving you an accurate impression.
China is recovering from generations of being colonized, being doped-up-by-drug-cartels-with-a-navy, acts of genocide by a colonizing neighbor, forced to cough up money (like Haiti did) due to losing wars, violent revolution, and is only in my lifetime lifting almost 1.3B out of extreme poverty. My own grandfather was sold into indentured servitude to support his parents' opium habit. I have a grandmother who ran away from home because her (single) mom could only afford education for one of her two children, so she prioritized the boy. I am glad that China is no longer like that, that it's a legit modern (or getting there) nation, and no amount of spin on how that's 'bad' for the West for China to 'catch up' can change that.
Nefarious plans to control the world? China has a historical tendency to under-invest in the military and over-invest in consumer production / quality-of-life infrastructure. This is literally the opposite of the colonizing powers. It is the crucial tendency towards commerce over war that has caused the past couple centuries of turmoil.
Relevant question: which countries, during their Industrial Revolution, had universal suffrage? What were their international politics like during their Industrial Revolution? How does China measure up to that?
> One way, for example: Have only Chinese nationals operate the railway equipment or the dispatching... In today's world where nothing operates without massive amounts of computers...
I've only met a few Chinese entrepreneurs who work in Africa, so my insight here will be limited in scope, but that's better than entirely theoretical.
These are just ordinary people -- I mean, they're adventurous enough to venture out and build a company, find product-market-fit, whether that's selling cell phones in South Africa or lingerie in Egypt. The notion that they are secretly at the beck-and-call of a shadowy government organization as opposed to entrepreneurs eking out a profit doesn't ring true. As much as that's not a researched scientific opinion, I can say that your assessment bears no resemblance to the folks I've gotten to know.
They have more in common with the Chinese diaspora, the engineers, the doctors and lawyers, the parental generation of restauranteurs and laundry shop owners, than some shadowy conspiracy to hold some country's infrastructure hostage for military reasons.
The Africa that they describe to me is so different from the one I see in movies like Black Hawk Down. They talk about every shortcoming as a potential business opportunity, not as a derogatory way to judge the country or continent. They talk about the impact of gender roles being an inhibitory force on GDP growth, and how frustrating / unexpected it is for women to quit a manufacturing job when they get married. Like, that kind of employee turnover really impacts the economics of production, and what the hell does marriage / children have to do with quitting one's job anyway? Don't they need to be breadwinners?
> Indeed, indeed - and exactly this is what makes me afraid. ... when they try to annex Taiwan for good
Are you aware that amongst Taiwan's trading partners, the largest one by far is Mainland China? It's also funny that every Western article that criticizes Foxconn (b/c China-bashing) doesn't mention that it's actually a Taiwanese company. Not that Foxconn-bashing is at all rational...
Well anything with "disruption" in the name certainly will be assumed to follow business practices similar to Uber - they (and AirBnB) poisoned the well pretty much with their blatant disregard for any kind of law. For the other part, I fully agree with you - and hell there should be way more discussions on drone strikes.
> China is recovering from generations of being colonized, being doped-up-by-drug-cartels-with-a-navy, acts of genocide by a colonizing neighbor, forced to cough up money (like Haiti did) due to losing wars, violent revolution, and is only in my lifetime lifting almost 1.3B out of extreme poverty. My own grandfather was sold into indentured servitude to support his parents' opium habit. I have a grandmother who ran away from home because her (single) mom could only afford education for one of her two children, so she prioritized the boy. I am glad that China is no longer like that, that it's a legit modern (or getting there) nation, and no amount of spin on how that's 'bad' for the West for China to 'catch up' can change that.
I agree that China has done massive leaps in economic terms - but not so on the human-rights part... and that's where much of the progress that has been made actually comes from: debts in terms of ecology disasters and debts in human rights (as shown e.g. by the suicide sprees routinely making headlines. Suicide prevention nets, I haven't ever heard about something like that in any other country).
> China has a historical tendency to under-invest in the military and over-invest in consumer production / quality-of-life infrastructure. This is literally the opposite of the colonizing powers.
Because today you don't need a massive army to be a formidable power. China has learned there from the Soviet Union which was dragged into bankruptcy by trying to keep up with the US in military terms... today all you need is economic power. China (and to a certain extent the Arabian countries) have total leverage over the West, given the dependence of Western civilizations on cheap oil and China as a production house.
> Relevant question: which countries, during their Industrial Revolution, had universal suffrage? What were their international politics like during their Industrial Revolution?
None for #1, and "warmongering" is a bit of an understatement for #2.
> How does China measure up to that?
On this part: very well indeed. What angers me is that the Chinese leadership does not have a tiny dent of respect for human rights (e.g. Tibet, but especially their desire to be a state in total control over their citizenry). Today's China simply has different focus on where they want to ignore any progress in human rights.
They may have made missteps along the way, but if Flint, Michigan or Puerto Rico were in China, they'd both be fixed by now... Though hypotheticals are unhelpful, I know.
> suicide sprees routinely making headlines. Suicide prevention nets, I haven't ever heard about something like that in any other country
Bashing Foxconn (a Taiwanese company) is often done in the same vein as China-bashing. Even before the suicide nets, the suicide rates were lower than the population at large. It's just that when you have a large enough population working at the same company, any number seems like a lot. Even without accounting for the suicide clustering effect, the rate was lower than similar-age populations at universities. After the nets went up, the suicide rate became almost negligible, similar to the prevention methods installed at the Golden Gate bridge.
> Because today you don't need a massive army to be a formidable power.
Until someone fear-mongers you into a plausible enemy. And then you're screwed. Prepare for another century of bloodletting? (Shudders.)
> How does China measure up to that? > ignore any progress in human rights
A lot of the progress simply doesn't get reported in the West because it's not China-bashing enough to get eyeballs. There is this popular perception that freedom of assembly doesn't exist or that all protests get cracked down on. In recent memory, there was a strike of factory workers in Beijing and Shanghai, and it resulted in better working conditions and a higher minimum wage. There's lots of progress, but we just don't hear about it here. You should have seen the state of human rights during my grandparents' time when the KMT (the political party that self-exiled to Taiwan and was the official China internationally for a generation) was in charge.
I'm glad we live in modern times and not those times.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2148945/
It appears to be popular with racists (at least going by the YouTube comments) because the middle-class Chinese engineers are needing to cope with very poor tribal workers who are not quite on board with the concept of the 9-5 culture but I felt the film itself humanised all sides and I was particularly touched by one scene where the engineers try to decide what to do about a worker who has damaged some bit of equipment that he wouldn't be able to afford to repair.
Generally made me feel good about the future of humanity.
1. This assumes that the way we build solar panels (or whatever) never changes. We lost a lot of steel-making knowledge in the early 20th century. Of course, all that "expertise" was replaced by machines, so it was mostly a loss of obsolete knowledge.
2. The solution is to pocket a fraction of the savings and keep that in your back pocket to maintain a teaching/research corps and to ramp up internal expertise when/if the subsidies stop flowing. Of course, this assumes a level of competence, self-control, and foresight that may be missing in modern legislatures.
Yeah but the Chinese basically took the European process, scaled it up and dumped the prices by using extremely low cost labor and massive state subsidies both at construction of the plants and at selling the product. There's no invention there, only the aim of totally destroying the competition. The only inventions happening are in research labs - and as there are no more notable fabs left in Europe or the US, that research will be applied in China. Our taxes basically funding our continued downfall...
> Of course, this assumes a level of competence, self-control, and foresight that may be missing in modern legislatures.
The only country which ever had this is Norway with its ultra massive oil fund. The Arabian countries are playing catch-up there with their recent investments but... well... building a fully air conditioned soccer stadium right in the midst of a hot desert isn't exactly a wise (or environment friendly) investment, much less a dozen of them. In addition, engaging in more-or-less pointless turf and proxy wars all over Arabia (and parts of Northern Africa too) are a totally unneeded drain on their resources.
A common bias amongst Westerners who have never visited China. Actually, a lot of "home-grown" innovation happens in China, but is not really covered by Western media. You don't get double digit GDP growth without research into R&D across a broad range of sectors.
The solar panels that were produced a decade ago are also not as efficient as the ones produced today, and are productized in very different ways. For instance, light-weight solar panel kits that include a battery pack and LED lighting have a very high product-market-fit for ethnic Mongolian nomads (who follow their herds) and sell like hotcakes over there. You can get another add-on kit for charging your smartphone.
I meant this sentence in direct reference to what happened with solar panel productions (because scaling and dumping in an extremely short timeframe was what happened and broke the neck of European solar).
I know that China has a massive ecosystem of invention (evidenced e.g. by the "gongkai" reports by Andrew Huang), I didn't want to laugh that down - sorry if it came across that way.
For centuries this has just been called plain capitalism. Now that China is doing the same, Europeans and Americans are in a shock? How interesting.
Is your assumption here that no non-europeans (including the Chinese) have contributed to solar research?
>by a combination of slavery-backed price dumping, industrial espionage, knowledge-transfer extortions (aka "to do business in China you have to find a local partner and work with them") and outright buying of the shells of doomed European companies.
You will need to provide massive objective evidence (i.e. not 2-3 links from googling "china solar" ) before anyone believes that giant assertion. Personally, I neither want a $5000 made in USA iPhone or a $99 bottom of the barrel chiPhone, but YMMV.
* "slavery-backed price dumping": There have been more than enough reports on the gruesome working conditions in Chinese factories. They are so widespread and notorious, they got dedicated their own Simpsons "couch gag" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEki-IBdop8). And yes, I consider this dumping - because a company that operates to Western working conditions has no way of competition against people with 80-hour workweeks, armies of children and adhering to safety protocols.
* For industrial espionage, the same (e.g. Nortel, Dupont, Transrapid, Volkswagen/First Automotive Works, plus countless cases in the German Mittelstand - even the German Constitution Protection Bureau warns about this: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/verfassungsschutz-china-spi...). According to a (bit dated, though) report, up to half of Mittelstand companies have reported Chinese cyber-espionage: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/industriespionage-was-...
* For buying shells of doomed European companies, have a look at e.g. https://www.morgenpost.de/wirtschaft/article207409333/Chines... - companies from as humble as trash burner EEW to such household names as Krauss-Maffei and Syngenta.
With the way the electrical generation industry is going, it won't be long before solar panel manufacturing is critical to our national security.
https://electrek.co/2018/01/09/tesla-solar-roof-tile-install...
This isn't necessarily great for the solar industry, but this is great for Tesla!
EDIT: I was initially wondering whether Tesla planned to make cells in the US for GF2 at all, or just import them from Japan, but according to this report from last March they already planned to produce cells in the US:
https://www.pv-tech.org/editors-blog/silevo-technology-ditch...
>The two companies hope to ramp up production at Gigafactory 2 to reach a capacity of 1 to 2 gigawatts of solar products. They currently have “roughly 500 employees” at the plant and the hiring process is ongoing, according to Tesla.
http://www.nasdaq.com/earnings/report/jks
http://www.nasdaq.com/earnings/report/hqcl
Further, the tariff applies to all imported cells, not just those originating in mainland China, which is odd if this just to counter unfair advantages that Chinese factories get.
If the tariff were just to target China, China would just route the shipments through other countries to get around the tariffs.
The upside to this news is that the tariff expires after 4 years according to http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/370171-trump-im... while the Bloomberg article implies it will stick at 15 percent until someone cancels it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/business/global/us-sets-ta...
There was some controversy, but much less than with these current broad tariffs.
Such broad tariffs usually leave the industries weak and fat, and after they are finally lifted they will do no better at competing in a global marketplace.
Our number one export in the future (besides our currency) might be the garbage piles of all the unfairly low priced goods we see as disposable, if it isn't already.
It's a tiny number of manufacturing jobs, at the expense of far more solar installation jobs, and the largely US-owned companies that do installs.
1 Business lobbies to get oppressive tariffs promising it will spur innovation
2 Tariff passes, business market value rises because of reduced competition
3 Business stops innovating because there is no foreign competition
4 Business shares stagnate without innovative product line because there is little need to innovate
5 Business lobbies for higher tariffs, repeat from step 2
It can be argued that tariffs are little more than Pyrrhic victories for the industries involved that hold back the nation as a whole and create a downward spiral
But most developed nations appear to have gone through a protectionist phase when building their industries, and often beyond, either by imposing tariffs on imports or subsidizing exports, manipulating the currency, providing cheap credit, fat government and military contracts, etc, etc, and that includes America.
And it most certainly applies to China now.
Tariffs and other policies should be designed to balance subsidies, eg the effective postal subsidy for Chinese goods (I use the term loosely, in many cases) delivered to American homes.
http://www.toledoblade.com/business/2017/03/19/Huge-Whirlpoo...
I'm not saying this is a bad move necessarily (I'm not entirely against protecting domestic industry to some extent), I'm just wondering if we were able to muster the collective will to take climate change seriously and do more than just let the market do its thing and hope for the best, how seriously could this affect the total cost? If we were to need to install 500GW of solar power over the next 5-10 years, would this dramatically increase the cost of that effort? Is it remotely possible that domestic production could accommodate a massive public push for solar?
If that's true, then 30% more expensive panels would increase the cost of a solar farm by 12%, falling to 30%/6% in 4 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/05/carbon-e...
Roll on peskovite (that's kind of a joke in context)
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/369838-week-ahe...
BOTTOM LINE: you don't win political power/elections by pandering to consumers - you win by pandering to producers.
This article is old, but I think it is still the same: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03...
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open%E2%80%93closed_political_...
Being unable to get new phones would merely be a personal inconvenience.
China is highly dependent on foreign coal, so they also have a strategic interest in creating energy independence.
Congratulations white-working-class Trump base, you played yourself.
Do you know how few jobs a solar panel factory produces? It's on the order of a few thousand.
If you want a LOT more jobs, you need to make sure solar panels are as cheap as possible in order for more to be installed, which is where the labor costs will be.
If China can make cheaper solar panels, LET THEM.
> If China can make cheaper solar panels, LET THEM.
That's a short term win long term loss attitude. China then becomes the R&D center for the next gen energy equipment. That's not in the best long term interest of the US.