President Joe Biden slapped major new tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, advanced batteries, solar cells, steel, aluminum and medical equipment on Tuesday, taking potshots at Donald Trump along the way as he embraced a strategy that’s increasing friction between the world’s two largest economies.
These tariffs are massive. They include:
* EVs 102.5%
* Solar cells 50%
* Computer chips 50%
* Steel and aluminium products 25%
* Lithium-ion batteries 25%
* Minerals 25%
* Ship-to-shore cranes 25%
* Medical Products Syringes and needles 50%
* Personal protective equipment (PPE) 25%
It is beyond disappointing to see the US retreat away from free trade in favour of protectionism of inefficient local industries. It is bad for the US economy and bad for US consumers.
The worst impact may be on the environment. Every environmental group in the world should be up in arms that Biden for all his rhetoric on climate is massively increasing the cost of electric vehicles, batteries and solar cells.
David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders.
4 comments:
Electric vehicles, lithium ion batteries and solar cells do not improve the environment. The mining of rare earth minerals required for all of these uses slave labour and generates a lot of pollution. Given that climate change is just political nonsense and not based in reality, Biden is actually contributing to environmental protection with his tariffs. Free trade is a dead duck. The US is right to want to protect its own economic interests and New Zealand is foolish to want to sacrifice its economic interests to a global market that cares nothing about its people or quality of life.
Get real, David.
If you think batteries are good for the environment you clearly haven't done your research.
I think that Biden introducing these tariffs is to be greatly regretted. Tariffs perpetuate domestic industries that lack the efficiency to compete on the global market, and hopefully, perpetuate political office holders facing elections, which is their primary purpose. Certainly, it has nothing to do with environmental protection strategies. There may be environmental issues in the construction of EVs, and the batteries that power them, and of solar panel construction, but I have no doubt that the environment is the winner through the reduction of the burning of fossil fuels that they enable. Biden's tariff plan may be rather less than Trump’s heavy-handed one, but either will frustrate free trade, the driver of global prosperity.
Maybe Biden was thinking of all those Americans in the Rust Belt and elsewhere with nothing to do but take drugs. If he could also stop the flow of Hispanic labour he might not make America great again but might improve the lot of the ordinary persons to near it. If faced by serious conflict America would be in nothing like the self sufficent state it was in in WW2.
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