Obama has accused China of unfair and ‘predatory’ practices in their rise in the clean technology sector.
"If left unchecked, these practices will achieve
their intended effect, which is to drive American manufacturers from
this critical emerging sector"
Besides a dollar initiated global currency war a trade war seems to be developing between the US and China, one which the US will sorrowly lose. As part of it China announced it would no longer export rare earth metals, it imposes higher duties on steel imports and the US slapped higher rates on copper imports. The quandry lies in that to develop its domestic market the US will have to slap tariffs on imports, but it is currently still to dependent on those to do that.
The US has profited since the abandonment of the gold standard of limitless credit with which it could buy oil and expand its wealth and population. The oil crisis of the seventies should have ushered in a clean energy era, but US oil companies suppressed that proces. Short term profits where the norm, China wasn’t even a factor then.
Short term profits has also driven the hollowing out of the US economy. Jobs shipped overseas where incentivised in laws passed by congressmen and woman that got pampered by corporate and banking lobbies.
There is something to say about predatory practices in Chinese business, they are well known, also in clean technology. There has been little respect for patents or brands and in some case one could suspect them of stealing technology, the reason why many European companies rather produce in Europe.
The US need not worry imho. Their territory has plenty of clean energy sources that can be tapped without advanced technology. The only thing they need to do is stop subsidizing the companies that are against developing it. Instead the US government is still in the throws of a mentality that profits from destruction, it does not protect its own jobs.
Obama may be right in fighting oil and gas subsidies, but the government as a whole should not be pointing fingers at anyone for losing out on the clean tech industry. Ultimately there will be no global market and one country will not have dominance over any industry, simply because it will be to costly in terms of logistics. The world economy is based on the worlds ecology, eventhough a giant derivatives and debt bubble tries to hide the fact.
A losing trade war with China may end in a real war. Jordans King Abdullah II has said there will be multiple wars in the middle east if the Israeli settlement issue is not off the table by september 30th. Israel just restarted the building process, Hamas vowed to fight on. Such conflicts will not make fueling the US economy easier to say the least about the catastrophic potential for everyone else. It may however motivate the world to recognize its local clean technology options and rethink how it can sustain itself more responsibly.