Conflicting Goals

Illustrating that it’s darned hard to accomplish multiple goals at the same time without compromising one or all of them, Josh Rogin makes this observation in his latest Washington Post column:

President Biden says climate change is the “number one issue facing humanity,” but that we must fight it while still upholding our values, such as human rights. China is testing our ability to honor both goals, by running its solar industry using forced labor linked to an ongoing genocide.

How many goals do you want to accomplish at the same time?

• Reduce global warming
• Reduce U. S. dependence on Chinese manufacturing
• Prevent genocide

and there are many more packed into those two sentences. IMO he’s not giving the Chinese enough credit in this statement:

Inside the administration, there was a fierce debate over the new sanctions, with some arguing that Biden’s ambitious climate change goals could suffer due to a disruption in the solar panel industry. The U.S. solar market might not be large enough to make the sanctions effective. And U.S. manufacturing of solar technology has dropped off a cliff over the past decade.

Of course, that’s largely because the Chinese firms have benefited from unfair advantages, such as cheap, forced labor, government subsidies and cheap energy from dirty coal plants in Xinjiang. Environmental degradation is just one more way Beijing is making the people of Xinjiang suffer to fuel Xi Jinping’s economic ambitions.

I think that’s all true as far as it goes but the Chinese authorities did use the money they made by selling consumer goods to the entire world wisely. They invested in production capability. Now they have dominant positions in hundreds of different sectors and it’s not just due to “cheap, forced labor, government subsidies and cheap energy from dirty coal plants”. It’s also due to being willing to delay gratification. Do our leaders have that much wisdom and tenacity? In contrast we’ve been throwing away the advantages we had and wasting our money in dozens of ways, not the least by financing endless wars without achievable objectives.

Here’s a little graph from the World Bank which might be illuminating:

I have some issues with using parity pricing as a gauge but that’s pretty good as a first approximation. The more we purchase from China, the more we contribute to carbon emissions. It’s darned hard to buy or make solar cells without dealing with China. How practical is it to increase carbon emissions by increasing their production? Especially when you’re talking about consumables.