Tariffs on Clean Energy

Here is Paul Krugman the other day, touting President Obama’s efforts to promote clean energy:

Some things I’ve been reading lately remind me that there’s another major Obama initiative that is the subject of similar delusions: the promotion of green energy. Everyone on the right knows that the stimulus‐​linked efforts to promote solar and wind were a bust — Solyndra! Solyndra! Benghazi! — and in general they still seem to regard renewables as hippie‐​dippy stuff that will never go anywhere.


So it comes as something of a shock when you look at the actual data, and discover that solar and wind energy consumption has tripled under Obama.

…

True, it started from a low base, but green energy is no longer a marginal factor — and with solar panels experiencing Moore’s Law‐​type cost declines, we’re looking at a real transformation looking forward.


You can argue about how much this transformation owes to federal policy. …

I don’t know all the reasons why solar and wind energy consumption has tripled in recent years, but yes, you can argue about the role of federal policy here. The federal policy that I follow most closely is trade policy, and what trade policy has been doing is imposing really high import taxes on solar and wind products, thus raising their costs. Here’s what my colleague Bill Watson and I wrote about this a while ago:

Over the last couple of years, trade remedy actions on clean energy products have intensified. In the wind industry, the Wind Tower Trade Coalition, an association of U.S. producers of wind towers, brought an AD/CVD complaint against imported wind towers in 2011. The U.S. Commerce Department started an investigation, and announced a preliminary decision in December 2012.


This decision found both subsidization and dumping in relation to Chinese imports and imposed an antidumping tariff of between 44.99% and 70.63%, as well as countervailing duties of 21.86%–34.81%. The Commerce Department also established a separate antidumping duty of 51.40%–58.49% on Vietnamese wind tower manufacturers.


In the solar industry, in October 2011, the Coalition for American Solar Manufacturing, a group of seven U.S. solar panel manufacturers led by Solar World Industries America, accused Chinese solar panel companies of dumping products in the United States. The Commerce Department opened an investigation in 2011 and announced the final ruling in 2012. The decision was to impose antidumping tariffs ranging from 24% to 36% on Chinese producers.

If we wanted to promote clean energy, the first thing we could and should do is stop imposing tariffs on these imports!