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[–]portace 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

So Biden banned solar panel products from China in 2021 due to "trade violations" (i.e. labor abuse in Xinjiang's cotton industry, except China bought a shit ton of machines years before the accusation and have 24/7 footage of them using the machines in the fields).

Biden announces that he wants to build more solar panels, causing gains in the solar panel industry in Wallstreet. He wants to freeze tariffs on China's solar panel products.

Lifting tariffs allows more access to a cheap supply chain in the domestic solar manufacturing industry, but can negatively affect Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia.

[–]SoCo[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Most of the trade violations I'm aware of go back to the Obama days and relate to market manipulation, such as dumping. They really set back our domestic solar panel industry decades.

Unfortunately, Obama's tariffs largely failed and were deemed a "game of whack-a-mole" (all criticism has since been erased from Internet memory, including the "whack-a-mole" term coining article its self). Trump followed up with the scorched-earth approach, just tariffing everything. He was criticized for it, and it probably had some negative consequences to innocent market players, but it seemed quite effective.

Biden seems intent on setting US solar back to the stone ages. This tariff lift cannot ever encourage domestic solar panel production. It can only go back to importing cheap Chinese solar panels. This will cause a boom in solar installation. Some domestic solar producers will do good, the ones who simply assemble Chines solar parts domestically.

The flood of dirt cheap garbage Chinese solar panels will once again crush US solar panel production.