In today’s news:
The Department of Commerce slapped high tariffs on solar products from China and Taiwan yesterday in a decision intended to address dumping and unfair subsidization of imports to the United States. The final ruling marks another victory for petitioner SolarWorld Americas in a lengthy solar trade battle.
We also have trade barriers against Brazilian sugar, which otherwise might be used in biofuels. So, on the one hand, we subsidize our producers of green energy (which one can argue is a WTO violation). But we use trade policy to raise the cost of green energy to consumers. It’s almost as if the environmental concern is just a smoke-screen used by rent-seeking producers.
It is now a double-edged sword. I think the banning of coal plants was a jab to the red interests. Now there are (controversial) reports that frack gas is not much better than coal on the point used for banning the coal plants (fabricating CO2 into a pollutant).
And then California effectively taxed gas an extra 10 cents a gallon and uses the money to subsidize domestic green energy projects, using domestic green energy components, which are more expensive but competitive because of the national tariffs against cheaper imports.
This is more than just the point of Mises that a limited interventionist state is not stable, because each intervention causes problems that inexorably lead to calls for further government interference in the economy.
In this case, the projects are managed by individuals who use the rent to heavily lobby the politicians that mandate the taxes and projects. So the more intervention-correcting interventions, the more the merrier!
You are being too coy- just delete “It’s almost as if”.
But the trade barriers are almost inevitable given that a big part of the sales pitch for green energy is the idea that a local ‘green energy industry’ and ‘green jobs’ will be created by the programs. Somehow every state in the nation is going to become a center for green energy technology–just as, previously, all states were going to become a ‘silicon something’ or a biotech powerhouse or develop a local film industry. But it’s not like all this money is wasted–it’s fairly effective in buying votes from a gullible electorate.
It is different people, the greens and the anti-foreign trade people are both Democrats but they focus on different things.