The Biden administration can stand up to China’s human rights abuses while still pursuing President Joe Biden’s solar energy goals, the White House said.
Biden “believes that we can both take a strong stand against forced labor, against slave labor anywhere it occurs, including in Xinjiang, and at the same time, cultivate and develop a robust, resilient, effective solar supply chain,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters at the White House on Tuesday.
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China is the world’s leading polysilicon manufacturer used in solar cells to create larger panels. Much of the polysilicon in the solar industry comes through Xinjiang province, where the Chinese government is accused of committing genocide against Uyghur Muslims and other minorities. The U.S. is largely dependent on China for scaled solar deployment.
“The president is determined to produce an outcome in which we can both get the solar deployment we need, and we can stand up unapologetically and unequivocally for our values,” Sullivan added. “There is no reason that the United States or any other country should be forced to choose between these two issues.”
.@JakeSullivan46 tells me on question of climate change & human rights, Biden “believes we can both take a strong stand against slave labor anywhere that occurs including in Xinjiang and at the same time cultivate and develop a robust, resilient and effective solar supply chain.”
— Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) October 26, 2021
Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry has acknowledged probable human rights abuses in the solar supply chain.
During a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing in May, Kerry conceded likely forced labor in panel production, telling Republican Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, “It is a problem.”
Kerry then cited “solar panels that we believe in some cases are being produced by forced labor.”
China is also the world’s largest producer of rare earth minerals used in magnets for wind turbines and other green energy systems, which Kerry pointed to as another example of Washington’s reliance on Beijing in the green energy sector. At the time, Washington weighed sanctions on solar panels from China over the forced labor, Kerry said.
China has disputed U.S. allegations of human rights abuses, and the climate envoy has since dampened his public criticism of Beijing. More recently, Kerry stated that climate is a global challenge, “not a geostrategic weapon or tool.”
China has said that antagonism from Washington could hamper the Biden administration’s broader climate goals.
Upon taking office, Biden returned to the climate accord reached in Paris in 2015 and pledged the U.S. would halve emissions below 2005 levels in the next decade.
But Biden’s ambitions hinge on international cooperation, particularly from China, the world’s largest emitter of planet-warming pollution.
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“The United States should stop regarding China as a threat and adversary,” China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, told Kerry earlier this year, according to a Chinese foreign ministry readout. He said that cooperation over climate change “cannot possibly be divorced” from other tensions between the two countries.
