SYDNEY: In a world riven by great-power conflict, economic decoupling, high inflation and worries that the interests of capital are being put ahead of workers, an obvious enemy can emerge: Technology. The best way to preserve the status quo is to destroy the machinery that promises a change to existing ways.
If green technology such as electric vehicles, solar panels and home batteries gets badged as foreign and threatening and finds itself excluded via laws and tariff policies, then drastically falling costs aren’t going to be enough to get it into the hands of consumers. Spurious national security and industrial policy concerns will be sufficient to banish it.
The European Union, which doesn’t impose tariffs on photovoltaic imports, installed nearly twice as much solar last year as the US, and more than seven times as much as India, despite weather that’s far less suited for the technology.Electric vehicles look like they may be the next front in this conflict. China’s shift from one of the world’s biggest car importers to among its biggest exporters has troubled its trading partners.
With European and US automakers slowing their decarbonisation targets and slumping prices for battery metals likely to push Chinese EVs well below the cost of conventional cars, the perceived threat of cheaper, cleaner, better imported automobiles will only grow. This trajectory could grow a good deal darker if elections this year replace the centrist administrations of presidents Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels and Joe Biden in Washington with more nativist and protectionist politicians. As we’ve seen in Japan, South Africa and India, minor tweaks to obscure regulations can be remarkably effective at stopping clean technology in its tracks.
They also need to remember that what they have right now is not energy security. Raimondo’s nightmare vision of foreign authoritarians playing havoc with transport networks doesn’t need secret kill switches.