Earlier this week, Will Rafey argued convincingly that “China, moving rapidly into the void left by U.S. inaction, is poised to leap beyond the U.S. and seize control of the emerging clean energy economy.” What he didn’t argue convincingly is that this matters.
It doesn’t. For our fall Business of America issue, Will himself wrote in his excellent article “Clean Energy, Dirty Politics” that
The argument made by proponents of green jobs is a win-win-win: fix unemployment, protect the environment, and establish American competitiveness in a rapidly growing international market. Even in a time of economic crisis, who can disagree with such a proposal? Yet the evidence suggests that “green jobs” has become a hollow political catchphrase, a supposedly economic and environmental boon that could end up as neither. Unless legislation is carefully crafted, its overly optimistic proponents could provoke a backlash against the larger environmental movement and complicate efforts to tackle climate change.
So “green jobs” are not the future of the world economy, the sector we would need to dominate to maintain our status as the world’s biggest economy. The remaining reason to be concerned about China’s potential leadership in the rapidly growing clean energy sector (emphasis on “sector,” not “economy”) is that we will be beholden to China for our energy needs, as we are beholden to Saudi Arabia etc. now for oil. Such dependence on China would probably be more damaging than our current dependence on Middle Eastern oil because we already depend on China for cheap manufacturing.
But the nature of clean energy, or at least of the already-existing clean energy technologies, makes such a dependence on China unlikely. By definition, any fuel required by a renewable source must be abundant all over the world. And the existing clean nonrenewables (nuclear is the only one which comes to mind; carbon capture and storage remains unproven) use fuels for which we don’t depend on China.
If China does beat us (and Europe) in the race to the big clean energy breakthrough, then it is plausible that China will use its enormous reserves of U.S. dollars to directly invest in a Chinese-designed, maybe Chinese-built, clean energy infrastructure in America.
What’s so bad about that? We’d have a whole lot of clean energy which we wouldn’t have built so quickly ourselves. Utilities are sufficiently regulated that the Chinese won’t be able to build up a cartel and then rip us off. The biggest problem that I can imagine is that China will somehow maintain remote control over our electrical grid and be able to use that control for political ends. Is that why we’re so concerned about winning the clean energy race? The “race” is just another manifestation of the phenomenon Will described in his fall article, an attempt by environmentalists to argue for action on climate change in terms they expect to be better received than the fundamental environmental justifications, but terms which are ultimately unconvincing.
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