The New Yorker:

After President Joe Biden announced last month that he was quadrupling the tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, which tend to be much cheaper than E.V.s sold in this country, he ran into charges that he was undercutting his environmental commitments. The Democratic governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, called the decision “horrible news for American consumers and a major setback for clean energy.” Robert Lawrence, a trade expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School, told The Hill, “What Biden has done is to underscore that he prefers trade protectionism to decarbonizing the economy.”

In a recent conversation with me, Heather Boushey, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, insisted that the new policy measures were consistent with the Biden Administration’s climate goals, which include cutting emissions in the power sector to zero by 2035 and creating an entirely emissions-neutral economy by 2050. To meet these targets, the Administration has introduced a range of policies on E.V.s, which include extending tax credits to people who purchase them, giving subsidies to automakers that build them, and now, somewhat counterintuitively, raising tariffs on Chinese E.V.s and batteries. “This is an industrial strategy, but it is also about the climate,” Boushey said. “This is about building up a domestic industry and technologies that are key to the clean-energy future.” She pointed out that China had established a “choke hold” on some critical components, such as graphite, used for E.V. batteries. “From a policy perspective, it makes no sense to cede control of these vital industries,” she said.

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