US: The retro silliness of our green trade war with China

By Lisa Margonelli

How very 1992.

Yesterday the Commerce Department decided to put a 13 to 26 percent tariff on Chinese made wind towers -- as punishment for "dumping" the towers in the American market at a price that may be less than cost. This follows the recent preliminary recommendation of a 31-to 250 percent tariff on Chinese-made solar cells because the Chinese government subsidizes the industry. Last week, the Chinese government filed a complaint against the U.S. for imposing the tariffs with the WTO, and so we're off to the races on a greentech trade war that feels awfully retro.

The Commerce Department's recent decisions are an attempt to return to a simpler past, rather than building a fairer future. Tariffs are not going reverse time so that the U.S. has the 27 percent share of the global solar manufacturing market that it had in 2001 -- instead of 2010's 5 percent share. Nor will the tariffs create jobs here or hasten the installation of green technologies. In fact, it is likely to do the opposite: Higher prices will dampen the installation of solar and wind here, causing layoffs in the solar and wind installation industry and rolling back the progress these green industries have made. Imposing tariffs will certainly not increase American government subsidies so that they can compete with China's.

Tariffs are an old tool for an old problem when countries subsidized domestic industries to drive exports. Today big companies span multiple countries, as do capital, supply chains, and markets. Borders are no longer the relevant identifier: The lead complainant in the solar case is a German company with a U.S.-based plant, hardly the Andy Griffith character the laws were meant to protect. Read veteran China auto industry reporter Alysha Webb's excellent Electric Vehicles blog, and you'll see a that U.S. and Chinese green startups have complex interlocking financial, intellectual, and market relationships with each other. Michigan-based ALTe LLC is wooing markets in China and the U.S. at the same time. The future is a complicated mix of cross-Pacific competition and cooperation and what we need is a new way to describe them -- coopertition, maybe -- and a new way to make them fair. But the old frameworks don't apply.

The language of the tariff case depicts Americans as victims of Chinese "dumping." But that obscures the real victims of this dumping. If anything, a worldwide supply of cheap solar panels has reallocated money from the pockets of Chinese peasants to the newly solar rooftops of Orange County yuppies. It's those peasants who shouldNike Shox Avenue 808