US Not Ready to ‘Go Green,’ China Would Be Main Beneficiary: Expert

Brandon M, ranch manager at Fortitude Ranch Nevada, stands beside solar panels on Feb. March 2, 2023. Allan Stein/The Epoch Times

The United States is not ready to go for green policies, and the push for it will mainly benefit China, according to Kelly Sloan, senior fellow in energy and environment at Centennial Institute, the Colorado Christian University’s think tank.

Sloan said that legislators’ push for green energies to try and encourage the market to go to a place where it’s not ready to go is naturally inefficient.

“While in the short term, it may benefit Chinese companies, in the long term, I think that will hurt the American economy, even with China’s contribution aside,” Sloan told “China in Focus” on NTD, the sister media outlet of the Epoch Times.

The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by President Joe Biden last August, seeks to direct spending, tax credits, and loans to bolster technology such as solar panels and equipment to reduce pollution at coal- and gas-powered power plants.

The top-line price of the bill’s climate policies is around $369 billion.

The Inflation Reduction Act emphasizes tax incentives for companies and individuals who switch to renewable energy sources.

For instance, the bill would dole out as much as $28,500 in tax incentives to American households who buy more energy-efficient electric home appliances, install solar panels on their homes, and buy new electric vehicles. Though families would need to do all these to reach that $28,500 figure, it represents one of the largest government climate incentives ever for individual households.

Sloan called the legislative move a “political decision.”

“The most efficient renewable resource is primarily offshore wind; solar still makes up, even with the advances in renewable technology, only a minute fraction of the overall renewable, the overall energy contribution among renewable,” he said.

China Benefits

According to the expert, the green bill pursues two-tier goals: incentivize demand and domestic production.

“The issue with incentivizing domestic production, domestic manufacturing, is that that’s a very long-term play. And that’s going to take decades, not months or years, to bring in,” he said.

“So if you’re going to incentivize green technologies, you necessarily have to include China because they are the ones that predominate,” he added.

China remains the world’s biggest supplier of the components and materials required for renewable energy technologies.

Between 2010 and 2020, China’s share of global polysilicon production increased from 26 percent to 82 percent—while the U.S. share decreased from 35 percent to 5 percent, according to a 2021 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Silicon is a key ingredient in solar panels, and in 2021, China accounted for 75 percent of global photovoltaic (PV) module production, according to statistics.

As a result, he said, any piece of climate legislation that tries to incentivize demand for renewables for electric vehicles (EV), for solar panels, in the United States is going to benefit China because “China has such a corner on the supply for raw materials for those things.”

Fuel Prices Increase

Sloan predicted that if the United States keeps going down the path of scaling back on domestic production of traditional energy, that is, fossil fuels and nuclear power, Americans will see an increase in fuel prices.

“If among the jumble of legislation is some political will to increase our use of nuclear, increase our use of fossil fuels, and smartly increase our use of renewables, that can mitigate that load. But if we allow China to do the same thing that OPEC did in the 1970s with oil, if we’re not trying to do the same thing today with some of these critical raw materials to capitalize it, and we don’t have any alternatives, then we can definitely see rising consumer prices, simply from that side as well,” he said.

“I think it’s a little bit of a detriment to the U.S. if we are pursuing policies that mandate more solar panels,” he added.

To prove this point, he pointed to what happened in Europe during the Ukraine war.

“We’ve seen in Europe after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and natural gas supplies from Russia to Europe being essentially cut off, that Europe had to adjust its energy policy to be more realistic just to keep the lights on. They’ve kept nuclear plants online, they’ve opened up coal plants again, and they’re looking around the world for new sources of, particularly, natural gas for electricity,” he said, adding that the U.S. should do that.

Sloan pointed to the Biden administration’s approval of a massive oil drilling project in Alaska in mid-March.

He said it is a small step but “maybe a sign that the administration is looking around and seeing that their energy policy does have to, at the end of the day, keep the lights on and keep people moving.”

Jack Phillips contributed to this report.