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The US and Europe would rather impose tariffs on Chinese-made EVs than achieve the emissions reductions they have passionately advocated.
Published date May 14, 2024 • Last updated 7 minutes ago • Reading time 5 minutes
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BYD Seal 06 DM-i electric vehicle on display at the Beijing Motor Show on April 25, 2024 in Beijing. Photo by JADE GAO/AFP, Getty Images
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Something is wrong with the war to save the world. The climate change caravan is running on its own two feet. Ideology seeks success. Bad things are good, good things are bad. The mission was in serious disarray.
The United States and the European Union are extremely upset that China is doing what the United States and the European Union have been vocally advocating for years, and is succeeding in doing so. The East Asian country is manufacturing electric vehicles and selling them in large quantities, reducing dependence on fossil fuels and cutting dangerous emissions. The conclusion in Washington and Brussels is clear: China must be stopped.
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Academics, activists, right-thinking journalists, and “progressives” of all stripes agree that climate change is existential. They insist that all obstacles to slowing its progress must be removed. Economic imperatives are not allowed to intervene. It's all about saving the planet, protecting life and securing our future. Therefore, you should not build pipelines. Do not extract the oil. Fossil fuels should not be burned. Vehicles using any of these elements must be blocked, disrupted, or replaced. Progressives rally around these directives, treating them as morally and ethically unchallenged. Jobs lost, industries downsized, and livelihoods destroyed in the process are the price of human progress.
But something is out of control. It's as if ideology has turned on itself, like one of his sci-fi thrillers where robots attack their creators. All it needs is Arnold Schwarzenegger to play the lead role.
China, whose participation in the carbon movement was attacked by Western countries, voluntarily withdrew from membership. We also discovered lucrative business opportunities. Somewhere in Beijing or Shanghai, someone realized that with its huge population, low wages, and rich supply of technical skills, it was well placed to provide the West with exactly what it wanted. . Today, the company produces everything needed to successfully fight climate change. Windmill parts, solar panels, semiconductors, batteries and more – all the supplies a determined environmental rebel army would need. We do this efficiently and effectively, mass producing critical products at attractive prices.
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Far from celebrating this miracle, Western reactions have shown deep concern. There are many factories in the member countries, but they cannot produce the same thing at the same price. What good is saving the Earth if someone else is saving it? It turns out that while the West really wants to save the planet and save the world, they also want to benefit themselves.
China doesn't seem to get the message. Perhaps we have not been able to glean all the complexities of Western cultural thought. Maybe you just think we're all a little weird. This policy, which upset governments in Europe and North America, made matters worse. Since I had already created all the components, I thought I could just put them together to create a finished product.
This makes perfect sense, so I went ahead. Factories started making cars. After a while, they started making good cars. They made a good battery-powered car. They made good cars that ran on batteries and were popular. They made a great car that ran on batteries, was popular, and was affordable. And they started exporting them to countries that wanted affordable, popular, and quality cars that ran on batteries.
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Rather than hailing this as a positive development in reducing carbon dioxide, Western leaders are determined to destroy it. When Donald Trump was president, he was ahead of his time in spotting the problem, perhaps because logic and Trump don't always have a good relationship. His administration introduced tariffs on Chinese goods to avoid Americans making the mistake of buying Chinese goods. The Biden administration kept the tariffs in place. The European Union has started talking about sanctions, forgetting that nothing is more important than defeating the existential threat of climate change, even as popular and affordable Chinese cars increasingly appear on the scene. According to one analysis, tariffs as high as 55% could be needed to “make exports to European markets less attractive.” If China turns out to be better and faster at climate change, how can European automakers produce vehicles that avoid climate change? Jobs will be lost and the economy will suffer. may be affected.
President Joe Biden, who is in charge of climate change, is determined to keep Chinese cars in China, as have European presidents. The Biden administration has moved heaven and earth to get approval to spend billions of dollars to support and promote America's climate change industry, arguing that the very future of the planet is at stake. He argued that the oil industry is deteriorating and needs to be cut, even though the United States is becoming the world's largest oil producer. Therefore, a car with zero emissions must be good by definition. Unless it's popular, affordable, and made in China, where for some reason that definition doesn't apply.
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Biden is therefore expected to impose tariffs of up to 100% on Chinese electric vehicles, in addition to imposing fines on other products that help fight climate change. The rationale, explained by the New York Times, is that China is “flooding the global market with cheap solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, and other products.”
Well, just imagine. Here the world is crying out for an all-out war on climate change, and hostility towards fossil fuels in particular is growing, but the Chinese are not only starting to produce useful products, but also selling them to other countries. what are they thinking?
Once again, Trump is ahead of the curve on this issue. You have to wake up pretty early in the morning to beat Trump on some very contrarian public policies. The presumptive Republican presidential candidate said he would be subject to a 10% ban on everything imported into the U.S. and 60% on everything imported from China that was made outside the U.S., whether made in China or elsewhere. They want to impose a 100% tariff on cars.
Of course, this doesn't make sense, but at the same time it makes perfect sense. It is popular to punish China. Tariffs are self-defeating, yet oddly popular, especially among those who don't understand them and are most likely to suffer from their effects. European and Japanese automakers learned long ago that Americans had no qualms about foreign cars unless they were foreign-made, so they built factories in the United States to make foreign cars that were considered American.
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So the message to China is clear. Place a factory in Texas or Alabama and use American workers and all the Jakes to mass produce Mulan, Leap Motor, and G'Kar 001 at a high cost. Canada and Mexico may also step in and claim that under the trade agreement, a leap motor made in Ontario or Guadalajara is a leap motor made in the United States.
This is not how we were led to believe the world would be saved. We have been trained to accept that global cooperation is an essential means to prevent carbon disaster. That's why all these megaconferences are being held in the world's capitals, where leaders come together to declare that unity is essential to winning the war. But now it appears that victory is only valid if the generals are from the right faction. Warriors are at odds with each other and robots are taking over. Somebody call Schwarzenegger.
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