The Scrapbook has never expected the Obama administration to be on the right side of history when it comes to free trade. However, when the administration quietly announced the week before Christmas that it was imposing massive new tariffs on certain Chinese goods, we admit to being astonished, despite our capacious sense of cynicism about what motivates this White House.
“The Obama administration will set duties on solar products from China and Taiwan that combined could exceed more than 200 percent, adding fuel to a renewable-energy clash between the U.S. and China,” reported Bloomberg. Now, if you believe that climate change is an urgent, nay, eschatological priority, wouldn’t you want to encourage as many people as possible to start using solar panels to lessen our dependence on carbon-based energy? How does drastically raising the price of solar panels do that?
It doesn’t, of course. Huge new tariffs are, however, yet another way to subsidize domestic “green energy” firms—and even some firms that aren’t domestic. The Commerce Department issued the new tariffs in response to a complaint from -SolarWorld AG, a German company that owns a factory in Oregon. SolarWorld’s stock jumped about 10 percent the day after the tariffs were announced. And it isn’t just the Commerce Department that’s doing SolarWorld favors. The company got $4 million in subsidies this past October from the Department
of Energy.
Unsurprisingly, SolarWorld spends a lot on lobbying—over $1 million in 2012, during Obama’s reelection campaign. While they aren’t on par with Big Oil yet, green energy companies have become a formidable lobbying force. As far as we can tell, SolarWorld is just playing the Washington game, and playing it well. There is, of course, ample precedent for a solar energy company buying influence with this White House.
This late in the Obama administration, the name Solyndra almost seems quaint. Despite the undeniably scandalous facts surrounding that particular company and its political donations—and the hundreds of millions in federal guarantees it burned through before bankruptcy—a flurry of stories in November claimed that the Department of Energy loan program that enabled Solyndra was actually turning a profit. Liberal journalists took a victory lap, though it emerged that the claim the loans were making money was wrong. Donald Marron, a former acting director of the Congressional Budget Office and director of economic policy at the nonpartisan Urban Institute, wrote a thorough debunking of the erroneous analysis that the loans were profitable. Almost no one in the media bothered to correct their stories saying otherwise.
The Scrapbook doesn’t doubt the sincerity of many global warming activists, even if we often dispute their facts. But unlike the accuracy of complex climate models, there’s just no debating that “green energy” has become a crony-capitalist racket. When it comes to making solar panels, the Obama administration had a choice between doing what’s right for the -environment and rewarding their lobbyists. They made their choice, and their priorities are perfectly clear.
