NY Times is full of great news tonight:
Now, Changsha and two adjacent cities are emerging as a center of clean energy manufacturing. They are churning out solar panels for the American and European markets, developing new equipment to manufacture the panels and branching into turbines that generate electricity from wind. By contrast, clean energy companies in the United States and Europe are struggling. Some have started cutting jobs and moving operations to China in ventures with local partners.
The booming Chinese clean energy sector, now more than a million jobs strong, is quickly coming to dominate the production of technologies essential to slowing global warming and other forms of air pollution. Such technologies are needed to assure adequate energy as the world’s population grows by nearly a third, to nine billion people by the middle of the century, while oil and coal reserves dwindle.
But much of China’s clean energy success lies in aggressive government policies that help this crucial export industry in ways most other governments do not. These measures risk breaking international rules to which China and almost all other nations subscribe, according to some trade experts interviewed by The New York Times.
Can someone explain why we, the United States, feel free to act like a rogue nation in basically every other regard- we torture, we’ll bomb and invade whoever we want, when we don’t ignore the UN we are telling them what to do, etc., but we draw the line here?
Bob
Dude, we really do build sweet weapons.
kindness
Money. Our government is bought and paid for and DFH’s don’t have enough coin.
MikeJ
We have no trouble with violating the same rules to protect arms dealers.
SiubhanDuinne
Wow, every post tonight is cheerier than the last. If this keeps up, I’m going to be nitrous-oxide-giddy by midnight.
Okay, seriously? This blog is suffering from a lack of Tunch photos. Lily and Rosie, too, also. But mostly Tunch.
Suffern ACE
I think our response to global warming is making all but the creme de la creme too poor to actually afford anything that might emit carbon. Our workers were just too demanding, anyway.
Gravenstone
One thing to keep in mind, the manufacture of several types of photovoltaics employs some pretty nasty/toxic chemistry. Cadmium and selenium are no fun and if you fail to control their waste streams, Superfund site doesn’t even begin to describe the outcome. So it’s not just the government aiding them outright, it’s also the government not giving a rat’s ass if their manufacturers dump poisons all over the countryside. In other words, they’re the US from 100 years ago or so.
Corner Stone
Straight cash homey.
schrodinger's cat
@SiubhanDuinne: We need Tunch, furry overlord of Balloon Juice.
beltane
It’s all very simple. Our lobbyist overlords are fine with all war all the time, legal or illegal. Job creation and the preservation of a habitable planet are controversial subjects, and clean energy would erode the quarterly profits of too many Very Important People.
An easy stimulus project would be the mass installation of solar hot water heaters. They are relatively inexpensive and save a lot of oil, propane, and electricity. Maybe if I live to be very old I will see such a thing happen.
Shinobi
@Gravenstone: What he said.
While they may have jobs I wouldn’t be surprised if the workers in those factories had extremely short life expectancies as well. (Though I guess that applies to pretty much all Chinese factories.) Our computers are made out of plastic, metal and human suffering.
ruemara
ummmm, tax cuts?
Chad S
So, after reading this, what’s the Vegas lines on:
-When Thomas Friedman kills himself(I have dawn EST)
-His method of choice(throwing himself into a wind turbine while dressed like a goose)
Its really easy to make a change in policy when you don’t have things like “legislatures” and “voting” to worry about. I have no problem letting the Chinese build solar panels as long as we’re taking the 2nd level market(renewable building material, we gave some govt loans to companies that can make building material as strong as concrete out of carbon emissions and salt water; and engines/power plants that use renewables) and staying on top of innovation.
Mike in NC
American Exceptionalism, you betcha!
mr. whipple
Trade war with China? What happens if they refuse to buy our debt?
Corner Stone
@mr. whipple: Do they have an ICBM that can reach the USA?
PIGL
@beltane: A massive solar water heating installation might make sense in many states…except for one thing. As soon as the Republicans were re-elected, they would have them all dismantled out of sheer spite.
The real answer to John’s question is this: probably 95% of the American population, and the entire political class, holds as self-evident that the USA should and will remain the dominant economic and political power on the planet, to whom all others must jointly and severaly bow, until the end of time.
Mike Furlan
We are not completely out of it.
Here is something my division at the lab is working on:
http://www.anl.gov/Media_Center/News/2010/news100119.html
Delia
@Corner Stone:
Naw. They just attach a few to those spiffy new solar panels, pack them up and put them on the boat. When they reach Long Beach BOOM.
zhak
Everybody knows “clean energy” and all that “green” stuff is a liberal plot & we’re much much much better off drilling for oil & finishing off the environment (which is also a liberal plot: after all, it’s just too darn expensive to think of anybody but ourselves, the environment, the rest of the world, and (especially) liberals be damned).
Corner Stone
@Delia: I just figure it’s not a real “trade war” without the whole “war” part.
martha
@Mike Furlan: Oh very cool. We work on the energy efficiency side, mostly helping industrial customers improve the efficiency of their processes.
Chad S
@Corner Stone: Sort of. If they fire it from northeastern Manchuria and want to only wipe out Idaho or Wasilla, yes.
I still like their landlocked aircraft carrier that they build in a lake on the premise of building a canal to float it out to sea eventually. The canal didn’t really get build and now they have an expensive “training” carrier.
Comrade Dread
I’ll go with the DFH answer and say it’s because building solar panels doesn’t involve the profiting the Military Industrial complex or Big Oil.
D-Chance.
Other than the Chinese, you know who one of the biggest and most active manufacturers of solar energy is in the US?
These guys.
lamh32
OT, but as if ya’ll needed another reason not to link to Politico?
Kinsley, Scarborough to POLITICO
Scarborough…ughh!!
Dave Trowbridge
Capital doesn’t care where the jobs are, that’s why.
Batocchio
Plutocracy. Fucks up everything, doesn’t it? In this case, big oil has the money and power, and doesn’t want any competition.
Linda Featheringill
Not as soothing as pictures of Tunch, but perhaps these will help until we get to see His Majesty again.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/48117682@N05/4973046678/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/48117682@N05/4972424913/
Mike Furlan
@martha:
More of “your tax dollars at work.”
http://www.energy.gov/news/9455.htm
Just Some Fuckhead
@D-Chance.: Oh Jesus, they’re liable to fuck up the entire Solar System messing around with sunlight.
Ron Beasley
The Chinese actually have a solar panel manufacturing facility here in Oregon. They took over a closed Japanese semiconductor plant. They got a bunch of tax breaks from the state of Oregon and they are taking advantage of the new regulations that encourage installing solar panels on your home.
schrodinger's cat
@Linda Featheringill: What a beautiful orange boy, I have an orange girl. Orange cats rule!
freelancer
@Bob:
ORLY? The Jedis are waiting impatiently.
slag
@Mike Furlan: Those are good. But we’re still going to get the snot knocked out of us if we don’t kick it into high gear soon. And we’re nowhere close to being able to kick anything into high gear.
Communist dictatorships. They’re efficient.
celticdragonchick
Because green energy is for DFH’s. Real Americans burn crude oil in the BBQ and leave the lights on all day.
SATSQ.
michelle
Too late.
Obama came into office too late.
Our chance was with poor old always right Jimmy Carter.
And you all let Van Jones go down without a fight.
Bringing up this sort of shit, when wingnuts feel free to use the opening of a documentary from China as a way to breed paranoia about internment camps is irresponsible.
Before we know it, Chinese solar panels will be selling (cheap) at a Walmart near you and you will buy them.
Kryptik
But don’t you know Green Energy is a commie plot to destroy the US gubmint and our way of life? Why do you think China is in on it?!
michelle
@D-Chance.:
Great. They will blow that up and kill more people in Texas or LA.
That works for me . . . .
BP is the most irresponsible company in the world. I dare you to name another more brazen.
slag
@michelle:
Uh. That would be John Cole who cheered that on. Mr. Loyalty himself. And come to think of it, I still haven’t seen a correction or an apology for that. Very disappointing, indeed.
Nonetheless, Van Jones went down because progressives are weak. He wouldn’t have been able to save us for that reason.
MikeBoyScout
Can someone explain why….
No time for that now.
Gotta burn me some Qur’an and get some tax cuts for the top 2%-ers while I wear teabags on my ears while carrying a picture of Obama, our Muslim foreign born president, as a witch doctor.
Get back to you later.
michelle
@slag:
Van is still around — though I loath clicking on that site. He’s still going to be a voice for the Gulf Coast — despite those who have forgotten — about him, the Gulf Coast, and Jimmy Carter.
Mike in NC
@michelle:
Halliburton or Blackwater/Xe? Still raking in hundreds of millions from the US taxpayer. But the GOP majority will sweep that under the rug after November, count on it.
michelle
@Mike in NC:
And BP accused Halliburton today.
Small world, I guess.
MikeBoyScout
@42 Mike in NC & Michelle:
The petroleum industry has been destroying ecologies and pillaging the communities in which it operates since it began in 1859 in Titusville, PA and the Allegheny valley.
John D. Rockefeller perfected the method of obfuscating and monopoly in the 1860s.
The BP blowout in the Gulf is one of a long string of disasters imposed upon all of us by Big Oil. BP and its combination of cronies will no more pay for what they have wrought now than Exxon did or Standard Oil did.
Ida Tarbell’s 1904 book, The History of the Standard Oil Company, is a great read.
Ailuridae
This has less to do with China’s ability to central plan as some are suggesting and more to do with having a responsible, adult understanding about the necessity for an industrial policy. While there are certainly fewer impediments to the Chinese government doing this that doesn’t explain Taiwan, Japan or Korea’s ability to do the same.
Pretty good American Prospect piece on the broad brush strokes.
michelle
@MikeBoyScout:
I hear you. On a small scale, my grandfather’s cotton field was destroyed by Western Oil. They dug a pit to dump their waste in and it poisoned his water well — in arid West Texas.
In the end what should have been a legacy that all of us would have fought over turned out to be a poisoned piece of land that my family begged someone to grow sunflowers on.
And Western Oil paid my grandfather next to nothing and then went out of “business.”
michelle
@Ailuridae:
It does explain the weird kill the government anarchist leaning of the Republican leadership.
Being a former anarchist, I don’t quite get what the Republicans are doing.
MikeBoyScout
@46 michelle:
You should really read Tarbell’s book, and also Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Creating the North American Landscape).
michelle
@MikeBoyScout:
What makes you think I haven’t?
burnspbesq
@michelle:
Xe?
sukabi
follow the profits… US and European companies are more interested in shoring up and increasing their profit margins than they are in doing something that will actually benefit society. Short term $$ and thinking vs. long term market domination, innovation and national well-being.
Unfortunately for us, our companies are interested in the short term $$.
michelle
@burnspbesq:
I know. Too well I know.
But let’s keep this to the oil industry. There is enough blood there.
If you want to blame Xe or blackwater on anyone, blame Clinton. For once it would ring true.
But for his actions, the outsourcing of responsibilities would have not been possible.
The Raven
The basic answer, of course, is that neither the United States (nor any other nation) wants to bell the dragon.
PeakVT
@mr. whipple: What happens when we fail to buy Chinese goods? It’s MAC – mutually-assured consumption, at least until the yuan floats freely.
daveNYC
You know what? We’re screwed. Just screwed. I’ll even bet you that there’s a good chunk of the US population that would look at these last two posts and think they’re good news, just because furrin terrists iz skery, and DFH solar power is for fags.
Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but the USA will be watching “Ow, My Balls” as we go down the shitter.
+4
michelle
@daveNYC:
Now that is the wrong attitude.
But yeah, I’m one to talk — I only comment here when it gets desperate.
Buck up boys. This is not yet lost.
Viva BrisVegas
If you mean fiddling free trade, you don’t draw any lines.
On agricultural products the US basically gives a big FU to producer countries anytime Congress feels like massaging the rural vote. Which is pretty often.
Alex S.
I’m almost scared about how much the Chinese are doing right. I wonder if that’ll continue once they have caught up to the West technologically and have to invent things on their own, but until then, they are on the right track, even if sustainability and reckless growth can be found side-by-side in China. It seems that at least the top of the chinese government is free of corruption and knowledgeable. And many of their top politicians are educated engineers.
mclaren
@michelle:
Correctamundo. Jimmy Carter, greatest president of the last 50 years. If congress and the American people had followed his energy plan, we’d own the world market for green energy, we wouldn’t have troops in the middle east, the price of oil would be $5 a barrel and dropping as demand for it continued to shrink, America would have a trillion-dollar annual surplus, and our unemployment rate would be 4% and dropping.
But America is too hopelessly addicted to the freeway Happy Motoring car culture. We didn’t want to give up our giant land-yacht cars and our vast freeway system and our illusion of total freedom behind the wheel of a planet-roasting deathmobile…
Nevertheless, you can still do your part. You can still help save the planet. I did my part. I put my car up on blocks going on 2 years ago. Now I bicycle or take mass transit everywhere, no exceptions, no excuses. You can do your part. What’s your excuse for not doing it?
And despite all the doom ‘n gloom, America isn’t completely clueless about green technology:
MIT increases battery energy tenfold with carbon nanotubes
California commission recommends 392-megawatt Mojave Desert solar energy facility
New catalyst offers radical departure for more efficient way of breaking water into hydrogen and oxygen
bh
because you made the line.
DecidedFenceSitter
McLaren – I don’t know where you live; but could you tell me how to make this trip without a vehicle? Or this one?
Now I’m relatively sure had we built the infrastructure 30 years ago, we’d be better off. And heck, I do ad hoc carpooling (aka Slugging), and before that, I used the VRE and metro; but ultimately the problem is efficiency. I learned to drive in DC because to take the metro from Franconia Springfield to the city added 45-60 minutes to any trip. At least. More if it was in the evening.
Tim I
The Obama Administration has taken some tough stands on Chinese trade abuse. Most notably they applied anti-dumping tariffs on imported Chinese automobile tires. This has reduced those imports by 40%, and revitalized the domestic tire industry, creating hundreds of jobs.
Many thought this action would provoke a huge confrontation with the Chinese. They protested, but took no retaliatory actions.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Corner Stone:
I
Cannot
Buy
More
treasuries.
Signed: love and kisses from the Bank of China.
There, is that terrifying enough for you? Sort of like the doomsday machine of money, only it works in reverse – as long as it keeps running, we’re OK. When it stops, not so much.
Try not to get any Cobalt Thorium G in your index funds.
Surly Duff
@DecidedFenceSitter:
Ummm…trains? Have you ever been to a large, developed city in Western Europe or Asia? They seem to have figured out how to provide efficient mass transit for its population.
Don’t you think that perspective is a little flawed? Yes, getting from Fredericksburg to D.C. takes a while, especially factoring in using multiple transit methods. But, saying that DC mass transit sucks (it does not provide enough coverage around the metro area, and it takes too long to get anywhere), so we should drive more instead of investing in systems that would increase the efficiency of mass transit will only maintain the status quo. The refusal to fully support and expand mass transit in major cities across America is the reason that so many feel forced to drive. Too many U.S. cities and states have done a horrible job focusing its infrastructure development on paving more roads and adding more lanes as a way to alleviate traffic flows at the expense of efficient mass transit.
Corner Stone
@DecidedFenceSitter: The answer is also to not have children, apparently.
divF
@DecidedFenceSitter:
At least for one of these, you’re wrong. See
http://www.vre.org/service/schedule.htm
For scheduled commuter train service between Fredericksburg, VA and DC.