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Where climate hawks meet China hawks.
Why are relations between China and the United States deteriorating? Why does the global outlook feel like it’s darkening? A few weeks ago, Brian Deese, President Biden’s former top economic aide, offered a theory on Shift Key, the podcast I cohost with Princeton engineering professor Jesse Jenkins.
We started by asking Deese whether the U.S. should import the cheap electric cars that Chinese companies are beginning to churn out by the millions.
He began by politely disputing the premise of our question. It was wrong to assume, he said, that China is a “market-based economy and a market-based actor.” It would even be wrong to assume we’re in “a balanced and sustainable global trading” system.
He continued:
In terms of the global trading system, we have this enormous imbalance because China has this enormous excess savings. And what they’re trying to do to try to solve the acute economic challenges that they face is to plow that into manufacturing with the explicit goal of trying to dominate — not just try to gain competitive edge, but dominate particular industries. And when they do that … they flood markets with cheap goods.
These “excess savings” impose their own burden on the United States, he said, so we can’t just accept the cheaper consumer goods and move on. “We, the recipient countries, end up paying a lot of the cost of those Chinese subsidies and those Chinese policies,” Deese said. “We end up paying by our own industries, our own capabilities being diminished and derogated in a way that they wouldn’t have that imbalance not existed.”
If these ideas seem to you to be coming out of nowhere, you are probably not alone. What could Chinese financial savings have to do with the success of its EV industry? But for people who have followed left-ish-wing arguments about trade and geopolitics over the past few years, what Deese is saying is immediately familiar. He is glossing a set of ideas argued most famously by the 2020 book Trade Wars Are Class Wars, by the finance professor Michael Pettis and the financial journalist Matthew C. Klein.
These ideas are widely understood in the world of heterodox economists who resist neoclassical approaches to the field but have received little airing in the broader press. Yet they are increasingly important to understanding how the Biden administration sees the world. As Dylan Matthews of Voxhas noted, the Biden administration can sometimes seem like a perplexing alliance of left-wing economic thinkers and China hawks. The Klein-Pettis book is the intellectual mortar fusing those two camps.
The book’s argument is nuanced and wide-ranging, but here is a brief summary. The global economy, Klein and Pettis argue, suffers from a destabilizing and dangerous imbalance, which, if left unchecked, could spiral into a global war. The cause of this imbalance is that since 1991, a handful of countries — notably China and Germany — have passed policies that depress their workers’ wages. These actions have included higher taxes, welfare cuts, lower environmental standards, and sometimes open graft, but they all achieve the same end: They impose great costs on the working class, artificially suppressing citizens’ income and reducing their quality of life, to the benefit of each country’s industrial leaders.
This, the “class war” of the book’s title, has rippled across the global economy in several ways. It has, first, allowed China and some European countries to build up a disproportionately large share of the world’s manufacturing industries. Since workers there are paid so much less than they would be elsewhere, companies are happy to relocate their factories to profit from cheap costs and (in China) low environmental standards. But because Chinese and German workers are systematically underpaid, they cannot afford what they are producing, thus forcing other countries to buy their artificially cheap finished goods. These are the titular “trade wars.”
This is not the end of the story. According to Klein and Pettis, China’s “class war” policies — such as its hukou system, which has created a roving migrant class within the country who lack access to welfare benefits — has artificially enriched its wealthy elite. These industrialists, executives, and officials cannot spend their money as fast as they earn it, meaning that they must save it. Specifically, they seek to save it in U.S. dollars, the world’s reserve currency, snapping up dollar-denominated bonds, stocks, and mortgages. This, in turn, drives up asset prices and generates artificial credit bubbles in the United States and its ally countries, as the world’s extra cash seeks a productive outlet somewhere in the American economy. And because global demand for U.S. financial products pushes up the cost of a U.S. dollar, it makes any goods produced in America more expensive, which further dings the competitiveness of American manufacturers versus their Chinese or German peers.
In short, over the past few decades, “the world’s rich were able to benefit at the expense of the world’s workers and retirees because the interests of American financiers were complementary to the interests of Chinese and German industrialists,” Klein and Pettis write. But note that there is a destabilizing cyclical mechanic to this story too: As China takes more global manufacturing, its excess savings build up further, which slosh around the global economy and generate larger and larger credit bubbles.
This is what Deese was referring to when he condemned China’s “enormous excess savings,” and this is why he identifies those savings as a key driver of China’s manufacturing boom. In the Klein-Pettis worldview, the underlying cause of the destructive tendency in the global economy is the way that its economy systematically steals from the poor and enriches the wealthy. As Deese told us:
China needs to decide if it loves this unsustainable, unbalanced, in many cases, illegal manufacturing strategy more than it hates the kind of domestic reforms it would actually need to take to boost domestic consumption, produce more balanced growth as it becomes a more mature economy.
This intellectual strain has long been present in the Biden administration’s thinking, but recently it has taken on a new prominence. On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned China against flooding global markets with cheap green technology exports while speaking at a Georgia solar factory. “China’s overcapacity distorts global prices and production patterns and hurts American firms and workers, as well as firms and workers around the world,” she said.
Biden himself has even begun to sound this note. You can see the soft influence of Trade Wars thinking in his promise that Chinese electric vehicles will not overwhelm American automakers. “China is determined to dominate the future of the auto market, including by using unfair practices,” he said in a statement last month. “I’m not going to let that happen on my watch.”
For Klein and Pettis, and presumably for the Biden administration, these “unfair practices” can be relieved only by China allowing the consumption share of its economy to rise. They argue that China must stop plowing money into unsustainable investment projects and instead allow its economy to be piloted by consumers, not party officials.
That this would require revising the country’s political system, which concentrates power in the hands of the economic elite, is what makes it so unlikely. On the other hand, if China fails to reform its system, then the consequences could be even more painful: Klein and Pettis suggest that a similar dynamic among the late-19th century Great Powers led to World War I.
Ultimately, Trade Wars Are Class Wars does not predict what will happen. The authors are clear that America’s and China’s economic growth are not necessarily in conflict; only the current dynamic makes it seem so. But the book also suggests a few ideas that it does not fully articulate — presumably because Pettis, who is a professor at Peking University, lives in Beijing.
The biggest of these is that China’s political economy could metastasize into far more malign forms than it holds today. If you think about a country’s politics and economy as necessarily growing and changing together — its politics taking a form that its economics can tolerate, and vice versa — then China’s politics and economy are not necessarily destined to grow along a consumer-friendly path. Today, China produces more solar panels and electric cars than it can consume, and it must find a way to get rid of them. But there are other lines of business — and political styles — that have a demonically self-disposing tendency.
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Between the budget reconciliation process and an impending vote to end California’s electric vehicle standards, a lot of the EV maker’s revenue stands to go poof.
It’s shaping up to be a very bad week for Tesla. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s draft budget proposal released Sunday night axes two of the primary avenues by which the electric vehicle giant earns regulatory credits. Congress also appears poised to vote to revoke California’s authority to implement its Zero-Emission Vehicle program by the end of the month, another key source of credits for the automaker. The sale of all regulatory credits combined earned the company a total of $595 million in the first quarter on a net income of just $409 million — that is, they represented its entire margin of profitability. On the whole, credits represented 38% of Tesla’s net income last year.
To add insult to injury, the House Ways and Means committee on Monday proposed eliminating the Inflation Reduction Act’s $7,500 consumer EV tax credit, the used EVs tax credit, and the commercial EVs tax credit by year’s end. The move comes as part of the House’s larger budget-making process. And while it will likely be months before a new budget is finalized, with Trump seeking to extend his 2017 tax cuts and Congress limited in its spending ability, much of the IRA is on the chopping block. That is bad news for clean energy companies across the spectrum, from clean hydrogen producers to wind energy companies and battery manufacturers. But as recently as a few months ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was sounding cavalier.
After aligning himself with Trump during the election, Musk came out last year in support of ending the $7,500 consumer EV tax credit, along with all subsidies in all industries generally. He wrote on X that taking away the EV tax credit “will only help Tesla,” presumably assuming that while his company could withstand the policy headwinds, it would hurt emergent EV competitors even more, thus paradoxically helping Tesla eliminate its competition.
While it looks like Musk will get his wish, he probably didn’t account for a small but meaningful carveout in the Ways and Means committee proposal that allows the tax credit to stand through the end of 2026 for companies that have yet to sell 200,000 EVs in their lifetime. While Tesla’s sales figures are orders of magnitude beyond this, the extension will give a boost to its smaller competitors, as well as potentially some larger automakers with fewer EV sales to their credit.
A number of other provisions in the Ways and Means committee’s proposal spell bad news for Tesla and EV automakers on the whole. These include the elimination of the $4,000 tax credit for used EVs as well as the $7,500 tax credit for commercial EVs — which leased cars also qualify for. This second credit, often referred to as the “leasing loophole,” allows consumers leasing EVs to redeem the full tax credit even if their vehicle doesn’t meet the domestic content requirements for the buyer’s credit. The committee also wants to phase out the advanced manufacturing tax credit by the end of 2031, one year earlier than previously planned. While not a huge change, this credit incentivizes the domestic production of clean energy components such as battery cells, battery modules, and solar inverters — all products Tesla is heavily invested in.
The domestic regulatory credits that comprise such an outsize portion of Tesla’s profits, meanwhile, come from a mix of state and federal standards, all of which are under attack. These are California’s Zero-Emission Vehicle program, which sets ZEV production and sales mandates, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas emissions standards.
While the mandates differ in their ambition and implementation mechanisms, all three give automakers credits when they make progress toward EV production targets, fuel economy standards, or emissions standards; exceed these requirements, and automakers earn extra credits. Vehicle manufacturers can then trade those additional credits to carmakers that aren’t meeting state or federal targets. Since Tesla only makes EVs, it always earns more credits than it needs, and many automakers rely on buying these credits to comply with all three regulations.
It’s unclear as of now whether lawmakers have the authority to eliminate the federal fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions standards via budget reconciliation. A Senate stricture known as the Byrd Rule mandates that provisions align with the basic purpose of the reconciliation process: implementing budgetary changes; those with only “incidental” budgetary impacts can thus be deemed “extraneous” and excluded from the final bill. It’s yet to be seen how the standards in question will be categorized. At first blush, fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions standards are a stretch to meet the Byrd Rule, but that determination will take weeks, or even potentially months to play out.
What’s for sure is that California’s ZEV program cannot be eliminated through this process, as the program derives its authority from a Clean Air Act waiver, which was first granted to the state by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1967. This waiver allows California to set stricter emissions standards than those at the federal level because of the “compelling and extraordinary circumstances” the state faces when it comes to air quality in the San Joaquin Valley and Los Angeles basin. California’s latest targets — which require all model year 2035 cars sold in the state to be zero emissions — have been adopted by 11 other states, plus Washington D.C.
These increasingly ambitious goals would presumably cause the tax credits market — and thus Tesla’s profits — to heat up as well, as most automakers would struggle to fully electrify in the next 10 years. But the House voted at the beginning of the month to eliminate California’s latest EPA waiver, granted in December of last year. Now, it’s up to the Senate to decide whether they want to follow suit.
To accomplish this task, Republicans have called upon a legislative process known as the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to overturn newly implemented federal rules. Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, for one, has been vocal about using the process to end California’s so-called “EV mandate,” writing in the Wall Street Journal last week that “it’s time for the Senate to finish the job.” And yet other Senate Republicans are reluctant to attempt to roll back California’s waiver. The Government Accountability Officeand the Senate Parliamentarian have both determined that the regulatory allowance ought not to be subject to the Congressional Review Act as it’s an EPA “order” rather than a “rule.” Going against this guidance could thus set a precedent that gives Congress a broad ability to gut executive-level rules.
During his first term, Tesla CEO Elon Musk stood in firm opposition to efforts to roll back fuel efficiency standards. But lately, as the administration has started turning its longstanding anti-EV rhetoric into actual policy, Trump’s new best friend has been relatively quiet. Tesla’s stock is down about 25% since Trump took office, as investors worry that Musk’s political preoccupations have kept him from focusing on his company’s performance. Not to mention the fact that Musk's enthusiastic support for Trump, major role in mass federal layoffs, and, well, whole personality have alienated his liberal-leaning customer base.
So while Musk may have staged a Tesla showroom on the White House lawn in March, awing the President with the ways in which “everything’s computer,” he’s presumably well aware of exactly how Trump’s policies — and his own involvement in them — stand to deeply hurt his business. Whether Tesla will make it through this regulatory onslaught and self-inflicted brand damage as a profitable company remains to be seen. But with Musk planning to slink away from the White House and back into the boardroom, and with House leaders hoping to complete work on the reconciliation bill by Memorial Day, we should start to get answers soon enough.
On gutting energy grants, the Inflation Reduction Act’s last legs, and dishwashers
Current conditions: Eighty of Minnesota’s 87 counties had red flag warnings on Monday, with conditions expected to remain dry and hot through Tuesday • 15 states in the South and Midwest will experience “extreme” humidity this week • It will be 99 degrees Fahrenheit today in Emerson, Manitoba. The municipality hit 100 last weekend — the earliest in the year Canada has ever recorded triple digits.
Republicans on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce released their draft budget proposal on Sunday night, and my colleague Matthew Zeitlin dove into its widespread cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act and other clean energy and environment programs. Among the rescissions — clawbacks of unspent money in existing programs — and other proposals, Matthew highlights:
Those are just a few of the cuts, which the Sierra Club estimates would add up to $1.6 billion for programs related to decarbonizing heavy industry alone. You can read Matthew’s whole analysis here.
Republicans on the Committee on Energy and Commerce weren’t the only ones who’ve been busy. On Monday, the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax policy, proposed overhauling clean energy tax credits. Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo took a look at those proposals, including:
There’s much more, which Emily gets into here.
In response to President Trump’s executive order last week ordering the Energy Department to “eliminate restrictive water pressure and efficiency rules” for appliances, the DOE published a list of 47 regulations on Monday that it has targeted as “burdensome and costly.” Appliances regulated by the DOE’s list include cook tops, dishwashers, compressors, and microwave ovens, with the agency claiming the deregulation effort would cut 125,000 words from the Code of Federal Regulations and “save the American people an estimated $11 billion,”The New York Timesreports. By the government’s own accounting, though, efficiency standards saved the average American household about $576 on energy and gas bills in 2024, and reduced energy spending for households and businesses by $105 billion in total. “If this attack on consumers succeeds, President Trump would be raising costs dramatically for families as manufacturers dump energy- and water-wasting products into the market,” Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, said in a statement. “Fortunately, it’s patently illegal, so hold your horses.”
Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin said Monday that the Trump administration plans to target stop-start technology in cars. According to the EPA’s website, start-stop technology saves fuel “by turning off the engine when the vehicle comes to a stop and automatically starting it back up when you step on the accelerator,” improving fuel economy by 4% to 5%, especially in conditions like stop-and-go city driving. Zeldin, though, characterized the technology as when “your car dies at every red light so companies get a climate participation trophy. EPA approved it, and everyone hates it, so we’re fixing it.” Neither Zeldin nor the EPA offered further details on what that might entail.
More than 2,100 climate adaptation companies generated a combined $1 trillion in revenue last year by offering products and services mitigating the risks of climate change, a new study by London Stock Exchange Group found. “One question that we are getting a lot at the moment is: ‘With the Trump administration in office, what does that mean for the green economy?,’” Jaakko Kooroshy, LSEG’s global head of sustainable investment research, told Bloomberg in an interview about the report. The answer is “this thing is now so big and so robust, it’s not going to implode just like that,” he added.
The analysis looked at 20,000 companies worldwide and “found that adaptation-related revenues last year accounted for roughly a fifth of the $5 trillion global green economy,” with green buildings and water-related infrastructure being the most significant contributors, Bloomberg adds. LSEG further noted that if all companies related to the “green economy” were considered their own industry group, they’d have had the best performance of any equity sector over the past decade.
Thermasol
Wellness company Thermasol has introduced the first off-grid, solar-powered sauna in the U.S., which can reach 170 degrees Fahrenheit in about half an hour.
Rob and Jesse digest the Ways and Means budget bill live on air, alongside former Treasury advisor Luke Bassett.
The fight over the Inflation Reduction Act has arrived. After months of discussion, the Republican majority in the House is now beginning to write, review, and argue about its plans to transform the climate law’s energy tax provisions.
We wanted to record a show about how to follow that battle. But then — halfway through recording that episode — the Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee dropped the first draft of its proposal to gut the IRA, and we had to review it on-air.
We were joined by Luke Bassett, a former senior advisor for domestic climate policy at the U.S. Treasury Department and a former senior staff member at the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. We chatted about the major steps in the reconciliation process, what to watch next, and what to look for in the new GOP draft. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: Let’s come back to this as a negotiation. This is the first salvo from the House. What does this tell you about where we go from here? Is this a floor? Could it get worse? Is it likely to get better as the lobbying kicks off in earnest by various industries threatened by these changes, and they try to peel things back? What do you think happens next?
Luke Bassett: If you run with the horror movie analogy here, this is scary. I think a lot of people, especially in any energy startups or folks who have been penciling out deals, to start really lining up new projects — or even folks looking for a new EV to buy are suddenly going to have to totally rethink what the next few years look like.
And, you know, whether or not they want to build a factory, buy a car, or have to switch from an electric heat pump to a whale oil burning stove. Who knows? That said, there are champions for each of these in very different ways in the Senate. There are lobbyists who —
Jenkins: — in the House, too.
Bassett: Exactly. There will be lobbyists weighing in. And I think it matters to really think through … I think we’ve been faced with gigantic uncertainty since January. And there’s a part where companies all across the energy sector are looking at this text as we speak and thinking, whoa, I didn’t sign up for this. And to combine this with tariffs, to combine it with the cuts to other federal programs in the other committees’ jurisdictions, it is just a nearly impossible outlook for building new projects. And I bet a bunch of people, CEOs and otherwise, are thinking, I wish Joe Manchin were back in the Senate. But you know, it is what it is.
Robinson Meyer: I will say that it could get worse from here because they will be negotiating with the House Freedom Caucus and with various other conservative House members. And they’ll also be negotiating against the president’s wishes, which is that this move and get done as soon as possible. And so when I talked to Senator John Curtis, Republican of Utah, who’s a supporter of the IRA, or wants to see it extended in large part, and I asked him questions like, what happens if Republicans really go to work in the House on the IRA and then it gets sent to the Senate? One dynamic we’ve already seen during this Congress is that te House Republican Caucus in this Congress is unusually functional and unusually strategic, and has been unusually good at passing relatively extreme and aggressive policy and then jamming the Senate with it.
And unlike what has happened in the past, which is the House Republican Caucus can’t really do anything, so the Senate passes a far more moderate policy, sends it to the House and dares the House to shut things down. This time the House, if folks remember back in March, the House passed a fairly aggressive budget and kicked it to the Senate and then dared the Senate to shut down the government, and ultimately the Senate decided to keep the government open.
I asked Curtis what happens if they do the same with the IRA. What happens if they really go to task on the IRA? They pass fairly aggressive cuts to it and they send it to the Senate. And his answer was, well, I don’t think the House is going to do that. I don’t think a bill that really savages the IRA could pass the House.
We’ll see, but I just don’t think there’s any floor here. I think there’s no floor for how bad this gets. And I think I just don’t, you know … Before we went into the administration, there was a lot of confidence that the Trump administration and the new Republican majority and the Congress was not going to do anything to substantially make the business environment worse. We’ve discovered there does seem to be a degree of tariffs that will make them squeal and pull back, but we actually haven’t found that in legislature yet.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.