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Why Chinese-made electric vehicles and solar panels now face some of America’s highest trade levies.
The United States raised tariffs on a range of Chinese-made climate technologies on Tuesday, including electric vehicles, solar panels, and battery components.
Inspired by the poet Wallace Stevens, here are 13 ways of looking at them:
The biggest tariffs in the bunch are for Chinese-made electric vehicles. The Biden administration has more than quadrupled them, imposing a 100% tariff on all vehicle imports. That means that Chinese-made EVs now face higher tariff levels than any other imported goods.
Right now, the U.S. imports relatively few electric vehicles from China, and the few vehicles that we do import — which are made by the Chinese-owned brands Volvo and Polestar — may not be affected by these levies because of how imports are counted under tariff law. (Neither Volvo nor Polestar has commented on the new rates.)
What’s more, the White House suggested in February that it would use national security law to prevent EVs from Chinese companies from coming into the United States at all — even if the cars were made in a country with which the U.S. has a free trade agreement, such as Mexico. So despite the eye-popping headline figure, the tariffs on Chinese EVs do relatively little to change the decarbonization calculus in the United States. America wasn’t going to import Chinese-made EVs before, and it’s not going to do so now.
While these EV tariffs may be more for show than anything else, that is not true for the other tariffs on clean technologies. Many of these categories already faced trade levies imposed by the Trump administration, and Biden has now raised them, effectively doubling down on his electoral rival’s policy.
Starting immediately:
The solar cell figure looks impressive — and has been the source of wrangling in the solar industry — but it matters less than it looks. The United States already imports more than 80% of its solar panels from Chinese companies operating in other Asian countries.
A second round of tariffs is scheduled to kick in in 2026. Even though these hikes won’t take effect immediately, they may counterintuitively matter more, because they affect sectors where China now dominates the global industry. The longer timeline suggests that the White House is trying not to disrupt the near-term market too much; in effect, it’s giving companies a deadline to diversify their supply chains. This second round includes:
Whether you love them or hate them, you shouldn’t see these tariffs as a standalone measure. They complement the aggressive subsidies that the Biden administration has already passed on EVs, batteries, and critical minerals in the Inflation Reduction Act. It’s often lost that the IRA subsidizes EVs and their constituent parts in two ways — not only with the somewhat convoluted $7,500 personal vehicle tax credit, but with the more important 45X production tax credit, which pays companies $35 for each kilowatt-hour of EV batteries that they produce in the United States. (There are similar 45X bounties for other manufactured goods, including solar panels.)
These policies now add up to classic industrial policy in the mold of Alexander Hamilton: The U.S. is hiking tariffs on high-value imports while subsidizing their domestic production, while also providing cheap credit via the Department of Energy to companies that want to participate in these new industries. The Environmental Protection Agency has also issued new rules that will encourage U.S. consumers to buy from these new domestic producers. The one element of the classic model the U.S. has not yet adopted — except in some states — is provisioning cheap land and easy permitting for new factories.
China, it should be said, followed a similar playbook to develop its own electric vehicle industry. That should let us dispel with one foolish idea right away: the premise that tariffs never work. On the contrary, tariffs sometimes do work; as the economist Brad Setser pointed out on the social network X, America only finds itself in its current position because of how well tariffs worked. Through a range of policies including tariffs and joint ventures, China walled off its domestic market and encouraged domestic industry. That industry has now grown to challenge the world.
But they do not always work. Another important aspect of Hamiltonian industrial policy is certainty: To make forward-looking investment decisions, companies need to know policies that exist today will still be around when the production line starts whirring. This China has in gobs, and the United States lacks. You may have noticed that the front-runner in this year’s presidential election is promising to repeal many of these policies that are now rolling out — just about everything but the tariffs.
These tariff rates are unlikely to go down anytime soon. There is no party in American politics advocating for free trade with China. The choice, in the near-term, is between Biden’s vision of free trade with democracies and developing countries, plus climate and defense-driven industrial policy at the margins, versus Trump’s vision of fossil-fueled populism that aspires to autarky.
There are forces within the country that wouldn’t hate to see a return of more open trade relations with China — you can see factions within the environmental movement, the Chamber of Commerce, and Big Tech pushing for it, to name a few — but they do not control a partisan coalition.
There is no equivalence between what the Biden administration announced today and the 10% across the board tariff on all imported goods from all countries that Donald Trump has proposed. Biden’s new tariffs focus on certain strategic sectors that American officials believe the country must cultivate to stay at the technological frontier, coupled with pre-existing subsidies meant to spur domestic production of those goods. Some of the tariffs only kick in beginning in 2026 — far enough in the future, policymakers hope, for the market to prepare. Trump’s tariffs, meanwhile, would intentionally and chaotically hike prices.
We’re only here because China has won Round 1 on electric vehicles. It has created a thriving, competitive domestic EV industry that includes the BYD Seagull, an $11,000 hatchback that gets up to 250 miles of range; the Zeekr 009, a $70,000 minivan with more than 500 miles of range; and the Xiaomi SU7, a sleek $29,000 coupe. As the car journalist Kevin Williams has written, China’s EV market is far deeper, more varied, and more sophisticated than many realize. Beijing has built a Silicon Valley-style industrial cluster that produces cheap electric vehicles for the domestic market and the world — and the Biden administration can do almost nothing about that.
This dominance has emerged out of China’s economic agglomeration and its successful climb up the technological value chain. As I’ve written, China once made textiles and toys; then it made smartphones and computers; now it makes EVs and commercial jetliners. This agglomeration of economic complexity is not an academic observation; in many cases, the companies now producing China’s most competitive EVs emerged directly from its electronics industry. Xiaomi, after all, makes 15% of the world’s smartphones. CATL — now widely seen as the world’s best EV battery maker — began as a spin-off of Amperex Technology Limited, or ATL, which makes smartphone batteries. The iPhone is, in a sense, the younger sister of the Chinese-made Volvo EX30: Both are Western-designed consumer electronics that are made in Chinese factories, through Chinese engineering expertise.
Does one need to spell out precisely why American officials might care about staying even vaguely competitive with China in the EV industry? Do I need to mention the role that American-made motor vehicles have played in world history? But the motorization of war — which has now gone on for nearly a century — requires getting fossil fuels to the front lines in dangerous convoys; by one estimate, more than half of the 36,000 casualties suffered by American troops in Iraq were on fuel or water resupply missions. Wind and solar are not now so potent that they could liberate armies from these serpentine supply chains, but energy technologies can drive surprising military innovations anyway: In Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh, we have already seen how e-bikes and drones powered by small, lightweight batteries have transformed modern warfare.
Perhaps this kind of thinking is premature, or too dire. Nonetheless, this is what makes this moment so different from the 1970s, when Japanese-made cars changed the American car market, or the 1980s and ‘90s, when the Korean brands arrived. For the first time, a country outside the American security umbrella — a country that, in fact, aims to compete as a geopolitical hegemon with the U.S. — has attained the cutting edge of motor vehicle production. Even if Michigan and Wisconsin were not so important in the Electoral College, even if climate change did not require the rapid decarbonization of the global car fleet, that fact alone would distinguish this moment from what has come before. This is why the Chinese EV industry poses such a profound challenge to American policy.
This challenge for the U.S. also requires conjuring an entire value chain from nothing. A thoroughly classic Hamiltonian industrial policy would involve reducing tariffs on commodity and low-value inputs, such as the minerals that make up batteries, while increasing them on high-value imports, such as completed batteries and cars. But China controls so much of the critical mineral supply chain — it is “the dominant player” in global minerals refining — that American officials feel like they must diversify; they must try to spin up low value supply chains for graphite, lithium, and rare earths at the same time that they encourage the construction of EV factories.
One of the most important aspects of the Inflation Reduction Act is that it pursues two simultaneous industrial policies: In some sectors (EVs, solar, batteries), it aims for America to catch up to its technological rivals; in others (carbon capture, hydrogen), it aims to preserve America’s pre-existing position at the technological frontier. Notice what industries aren’t affected by today’s tariffs — not carbon capture, not anything to do with fossil fuels, not even anything hydrogen-related, even though China makes 61% of the world’s electrolyzers. (That is because the Biden administration has shaped its hydrogen policy so it does not automatically favor the type of electrolyzer that Chinese firms make.)
It’s easy to get ahead of oneself here. Just because China has created a superior EV industry, that doesn’t mean it will have one forever; just because China makes better EVs, that doesn’t mean that America lags on all climate technologies. But make no mistake: America is trying to do something very difficult, and it has no guarantee of success.
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Instead of rocket fuel, they’re burning biomass.
Arbor Energy might have the flashiest origin story in cleantech.
After the company’s CEO, Brad Hartwig, left SpaceX in 2018, he attempted to craft the ideal resume for a future astronaut, his dream career. He joined the California Air National Guard, worked as a test pilot at the now-defunct electric aviation startup Kitty Hawk, and participated in volunteer search and rescue missions in the Bay Area, which gave him a front row seat to the devastating effects of wildfires in Northern California.
That experience changed everything. “I decided I actually really like planet Earth,” Hartwig told me, “and I wanted to focus my career instead on preserving it, rather than trying to leave it.” So he rallied a bunch of his former rocket engineer colleagues to repurpose technology they pioneered at SpaceX to build a biomass-fueled, carbon negative power source that’s supposedly about ten times smaller, twice as efficient, and eventually, one-third the cost of the industry standard for this type of plant.
Take that, all you founders humble-bragging about starting in a dingy garage.
“It’s not new science, per se,” Hartwig told me. The goal of this type of tech, called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, is to combine biomass-based energy generation with carbon dioxide removal to achieve net negative emissions. Sounds like a dream, but actually producing power or heat from this process has so far proven too expensive to really make sense. There are only a few so-called BECCS facilities operating in the U.S. today, and they’re all just ethanol fuel refineries with carbon capture and storage technology tacked on.
But the advances in 3D printing and computer modeling that allowed the SpaceX team to build an increasingly simple and cheap rocket engine have allowed Arbor to move quickly into this new market, Hartwig explained. “A lot of the technology that we had really pioneered over the last decade — in reactor design, combustion devices, turbo machinery, all for rocket propulsion — all that technology has really quite immediate application in this space of biomass conversion and power generation.”
Arbor’s method is poised to be a whole lot sleeker and cheaper than the BECCS plants of today, enabling both more carbon sequestration and actual electricity production, all by utilizing what Hartwig fondly refers to as a “vegetarian rocket engine.” Because there’s no air in space, astronauts have to bring pure oxygen onboard, which the rocket engines use to burn fuel and propel themselves into the stratosphere and beyond. Arbor simply subs out the rocket fuel for biomass. When that biomass is combusted with pure oxygen, the resulting exhaust consists of just CO2 and water. As the exhaust cools, the water condenses out, and what’s left is a stream of pure carbon dioxide that’s ready to be injected deep underground for permanent storage. All of the energy required to operate Arbor’s system is generated by the biomass combustion itself.
“Arbor is the first to bring forward a technology that can provide clean baseload energy in a very compact form,” Clea Kolster, a partner and Head of Science at Lowercarbon Capital told me. Lowercarbon is an investor in Arbor, alongside other climate tech-focused venture capital firms including Gigascale Capital and Voyager Ventures, but the company has not yet disclosed how much it’s raised.
Last month, Arbor signed a deal with Microsoft to deliver 25,000 tons of permanent carbon dioxide removal to the tech giant starting in 2027, when the startup’s first commercial project is expected to come online. As a part of the deal, Arbor will also generate 5 megawatts of clean electricity per year, enough to power about 4,000 U.S. homes. And just a few days ago, the Department of Energy announced that Arbor is one of 11 projects to receive a combined total of $58.5 million to help develop the domestic carbon removal industry.
Arbor’s current plan is to source biomass from forestry waste, much of which is generated by forest thinning operations intended to prevent destructive wildfires. Hartwig told me that for every ton of organic waste, Arbor can produce about one megawatt hour of electricity, which is in line with current efficiency standards, plus about 1.8 tons of carbon removal. “We look at being as efficient, if not a little more efficient than a traditional bioenergy power plant that does not have carbon capture on it,” he explained.
The company’s carbon removal price targets are also extremely competitive — in the $50 to $100 per ton range, Hartwig said. Compare that to something like direct air capture, which today exceeds $600 per ton, or enhanced rock weathering, which is usually upwards of $300 per ton. “The power and carbon removal they can offer comes at prices that meet nearly unlimited demand,”Mike Schroepfer, the founder of Gigascale Capital and former CTO of Meta, told me via email. Arbor benefits from the fact that the electricity it produces and sells can help offset the cost of the carbon removal, and vice versa. So if the company succeeds in hitting its cost and efficiency targets, Hartwig said, this “quickly becomes a case for, why wouldn’t you just deploy these everywhere?”
Initial customers will likely be (no surprise here) the Microsofts, Googles and Metas of the world — hyperscalers with growing data center needs and ambitious emissions targets. “What Arbor unlocks is basically the ability for hyperscalers to stop needing to sacrifice their net zero goals for AI,” Kolster told me. And instead of languishing in the interminable grid interconnection queue, Hartwig said that providing power directly to customers could ensure rapid, early deployment. “We see it as being quicker to power behind-the-meter applications, because you don’t have to go through the process of connecting to the grid,” he told me. Long-term though, he said grid connection will be vital, since Arbor can provide baseload power whereas intermittent renewables cannot.
All of this could serve as a much cheaper alternative, to say, re-opening shuttered nuclear facilities, as Microsoft also recently committed to doing at Three Mile Island. “It’s great, we should be doing that,” Kolster said of this nuclear deal, “but there’s actually a limited pool of options to do that, and unfortunately, there is still community pushback.”
Currently, Arbor is working to build out its pilot plant in San Bernardino, California, which Hartwig told me will turn on this December. And by 2030, the company plans to have its first commercial plant operating at scale, generating 100 megawatts of electricity while removing nearly 2 megatons of CO2 every year. “To put it in perspective: In 2023, the U.S. added roughly 9 gigawatts of gas power to the grid, which generates 18 to 23 megatons of CO2 a year,” Schroepfer wrote to me. So having just one Arbor facility removing 2 megatons would make a real dent. The first plant will be located in Louisiana, where Arbor will also be working with an as-yet-unnamed partner to do the carbon storage.
The company’s carbon credits will be verified with the credit certification platform Isometric, which is also backed by Lowercarbon and thought to have the most stringent standards in the industry. Hartwig told me that Arbor worked hand-in-hand with Isometric to develop the protocol for “biogenic carbon capture and storage,” as the company is the first Isometric-approved supplier to use this standard.
But Hartwig also said that government support hasn’t yet caught up to the tech’s potential. While the Inflation Reduction Act provides direct air capture companies with $180 per ton of carbon dioxide removed, technology such as Arbor’s only qualifies for $85 per ton. It’s not nothing — more than the zero dollars enhanced rock weathering companies such as Lithos or bio-oil sequestration companies such as Charm are getting. “But at the same time, we’re treated the same as if we’re sequestering CO2 emissions from a natural gas plant or a coal plant,” Hartwig told me, as opposed to getting paid for actual CO2 removal.
“I think we are definitely going to need government procurement or involvement to actually hit one, five, 10 gigatons per year of carbon removal,” Hartwig said. Globally, scientists estimate that we’ll need up to 10 gigatons of annual CO2 removal by 2050 in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. “Even at $100 per ton, 10 gigatons of carbon removal is still a pretty hefty price tag,” Hartwig told me. A $1 trillion price tag, to be exact. “We definitely need more players than just Microsoft.”
New research out today shows a 10-fold increase in smoke mortality related to climate change from the 1960s to the 2010.
If you are one of the more than 2 billion people on Earth who have inhaled wildfire smoke, then you know firsthand that it is nasty stuff. It makes your eyes sting and your throat sore and raw; breathe in smoke for long enough, and you might get a headache or start to wheeze. Maybe you’ll have an asthma attack and end up in the emergency room. Or maybe, in the days or weeks afterward, you’ll suffer from a stroke or heart attack that you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Researchers are increasingly convinced that the tiny, inhalable particulate matter in wildfire smoke, known as PM2.5, contributes to thousands of excess deaths annually in the United States alone. But is it fair to link those deaths directly to climate change?
A new study published Monday in Nature Climate Change suggests that for a growing number of cases, the answer should be yes. Chae Yeon Park, a climate risk modeling researcher at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies, looked with her colleagues at three fire-vegetation models to understand how hazardous emissions changed from 1960 to 2019, compared to a hypothetical control model that excluded historical climate change data. They found that while fewer than 669 deaths in the 1960s could be attributed to climate change globally, that number ballooned to 12,566 in the 2010s — roughly a 20-fold increase. The proportion of all global PM2.5 deaths attributable to climate change jumped 10-fold over the same period, from 1.2% in the 1960s to 12.8% in the 2010s.
“It’s a timely and meaningful study that informs the public and the government about the dangers of wildfire smoke and how climate change is contributing to that,” Yiqun Ma, who researches the intersection of climate change, air pollution, and human health at the Yale School of Medicine, and who was not involved in the Nature study, told me.
The study found the highest climate change-attributable fire mortality values in South America, Australia, and Europe, where increases in heat and decreases in humidity were also the greatest. In the southern hemisphere of South America, for example, the authors wrote that fire mortalities attributable to climate change increased from a model average of 35% to 71% between the 1960s and 2010s, “coinciding with decreased relative humidity,” which dries out fire fuels. For the same reason, an increase in relative humidity lowered fire mortality in other regions, such as South Asia. North America exhibited a less dramatic leap in climate-related smoke mortalities, with climate change’s contribution around 3.6% in the 1960s, “with a notable rise in the 2010s” to 18.8%, Park told me in an email.
While that’s alarming all on its own, Ma told me there was a possibility that Park’s findings might actually be too conservative. “They assume PM2.5 from wildfire sources and from other sources” — like from cars or power plants — “have the same toxicity,” she explained. “But in fact, in recent studies, people have found PM2.5 from fire sources can be more toxic than those from an urban background.” Another reason Ma suspected the study’s numbers might be an underestimate was because the researchers focused on only six diseases that have known links to PM2.5 exposure: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and lower respiratory infection. “According to our previous findings [at the Yale School of Medicine], other diseases can also be influenced by wildfire smoke, such as mental disorders, depression, and anxiety, and they did not consider that part,” she told me.
Minghao Qiu, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University and one of the country’s leading researchers on wildfire smoke exposure and climate change, generally agreed with Park’s findings, but cautioned that there is “a lot of uncertainty in the underlying numbers” in part because, intrinsically, wildfire smoke exposure is such a complicated thing to try to put firm numbers to. “It’s so difficult to model how climate influences wildfire because wildfire is such an idiosyncratic process and it’s so random, ” he told me, adding, “In general, models are not great in terms of capturing wildfire.”
Despite their few reservations, both Qiu and Ma emphasized the importance of studies like Park’s. “There are no really good solutions” to reduce wildfire PM2.5 exposure. You can’t just “put a filter on a stack” as you (sort of) can with power plant emissions, Qiu pointed out.
Even prescribed fires, often touted as an important wildfire mitigation technique, still produce smoke. Park’s team acknowledged that a whole suite of options would be needed to minimize future wildfire deaths, ranging from fire-resilient forest and urban planning to PM2.5 treatment advances in hospitals. And, of course, there is addressing the root cause of the increased mortality to begin with: our warming climate.
“To respond to these long-term changes,” Park told me, “it is crucial to gradually modify our system.”
On the COP16 biodiversity summit, Big Oil’s big plan, and sea level rise
Current conditions: Record rainfall triggered flooding in Roswell, New Mexico, that killed at least two people • Storm Ashley unleashed 80 mph winds across parts of the U.K. • A wildfire that broke out near Oakland, California, on Friday is now 85% contained.
Forecasters hadn’t expected Hurricane Oscar to develop into a hurricane at all, let alone in just 12 hours. But it did. The Category 1 storm made landfall in Cuba on Sunday, hours after passing over the Bahamas, bringing intense rain and strong winds. Up to a foot of rainfall was expected. Oscar struck while Cuba was struggling to recover from a large blackout that has left millions without power for four days. A second system, Tropical Storm Nadine, made landfall in Belize on Saturday with 60 mph winds and then quickly weakened. Both Oscar and Nadine developed in the Atlantic on the same day.
Hurricane OscarAccuWeather
The COP16 biodiversity summit starts today in Cali, Colombia. Diplomats from 190 countries will try to come up with a plan to halt global biodiversity loss, aiming to protect 30% of land and sea areas and restore 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030. Discussions will revolve around how to monitor nature degradation, hold countries accountable for their protection pledges, and pay for biodiversity efforts. There will also be a big push to get many more countries to publish national biodiversity strategies. “This COP is a test of how serious countries are about upholding their international commitments to stop the rapid loss of biodiversity,” said Crystal Davis, Global Director of Food, Land, and Water at the World Resources Institute. “The world has no shot at doing so without richer countries providing more financial support to developing countries — which contain most of the world’s biodiversity.”
A prominent group of oil and gas producers has developed a plan to roll back environmental rules put in place by President Biden, The Washington Post reported. The paper got its hands on confidential documents from the American Exploration and Production Council (AXPC), which represents some 30 producers. The documents include draft executive orders promoting fossil fuel production for a newly-elected President Trump to sign if he takes the White House in November, as well as a roadmap for dismantling many policies aimed at getting oil and gas producers to disclose and curb emissions. AXPC’s members, including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Hess, account for about half of the oil and gas produced in the U.S., the Post reported.
A new report from the energy think tank Ember looks at how the uptake of electric vehicles and heat pumps in the U.K. is affecting oil and gas consumption. It found that last year the country had 1.5 million EVs on the road, and 430,000 residential heat pumps in homes, and the reduction in fossil fuel use due to the growth of these technologies was equivalent to 14 million barrels of oil, or about what the U.K. imports over a two-week span. This reduction effect will be even stronger as more and more EVs and heat pumps are powered by clean energy. The report also found that even though power demand is expected to rise, efficiency gains from electrification and decarbonization will make up for this, leading to an overall decline in energy use and fossil fuel consumption.
Ember
The world’s sea levels are projected to rise by more than 6 inches on average over the next 30 years if current trends continue, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. “Such rates would represent an evolving challenge for adaptation efforts,” the authors wrote. By examining satellite data, the researchers found that sea levels have risen by about .4 inches since 1993, and that they’re rising faster now than they were then. In 1993 the seas were rising by about .08 inches per year, and last year they were rising at .17 inches per year. These are averages, of course, and some areas are seeing much more extreme changes. For example, areas around Miami, Florida, have already seen sea levels rise by 6 inches over the last 31 years.
“As the climate crisis grows more urgent, restoring faith in government will be more important than ever.” –Paul Waldman writing for Heatmap about the profound implications of America becoming a low-trust society.