Jason Bordoff writes in Cipher News about the importance of global trade for clean energy.
- Candidates and policymakers are embracing tariffs and protectionism to counter China’s clean energy dominance and bolster domestic manufacturing.
- This strategy threatens to slow global clean energy deployment by raising costs for consumers and businesses and hampering innovation.
- Free trade and globalization have raised billions out of poverty and unlocked unprecedented levels of prosperity.
- Free trade should again be used to diversify supply chains away from China and deploy more clean power.
“Support for increased economic openness, new trade agreements and the World Trade Organization is already retreating in Washington. It would be a major policy error, however, to conflate concerns about imports from China with concerns about trade more broadly. Indeed, the only way to effectively counter China’s dominance in clean energy technologies is to embrace more, not less, trade with most other nations.”
Read the full article here.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of C3.
