An article in Mother Jones details the progress China is making in developing solar energy and how the current administration in the U.S. is hampering the development of solar energy here in favor of trying to revive the dying (if not already dead) coal industry.
Some highlights from the article:
“Made in China” has long been seen as shorthand for shoddy. Whether it was fast fashion or toys, the rap on Chinese manufacturing used to be that it was all about leveraging cut-rate labor to knock off products designed in the West. Cheaper, certainly. Better, hardly. But that is changing fast—especially in the booming clean-energy sector. From solar to batteries to electric vehicles, China is rapidly gaining on the West in the most important arena of all: innovation.
In part that’s due to dysfunction in US clean-energy policy—which began before President Donald Trump but is intensifying under his watch. It’s also a result of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s belief that clean-energy innovation is critical to economic growth and the Communist Party’s survival.
…for decades, the United States was the clear world leader in clean-energy research and development. But America has fared poorly at moving those technologies from lab to market. That’s in part because government R&D grants have focused on basic research, on the theory that companies can do applied research themselves. China has taken the opposite approach, focusing public money on the technologies it thinks are likeliest to find a market fast.
Now, under President Trump, who has called climate change a Chinese “hoax,” the United States appears content to cede its lead. America has more than twice as many jobs in solar as in coal, and its installed solar capacity is expected to more than double over the next five years. Yet Trump’s 2019 budget proposes slashing the Energy Department’s renewable-energy and energy-efficiency funding by about 75 percent and killing ARPA-E altogether. (According to the Government Accountability Office, the Trump administration also violated federal law by withholding $91 million in fiscal year 2017 ARPA-E funding.) The administration wants to eviscerate several clean-energy loan-guarantee programs as well. Even if Congress staves off some of those cuts, Trump, by rolling back clean-power regulations and withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, has undermined market forces that could spur invention.
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