Look, I totally get it. Israel, tariffs, student loans, or his age might make you angry at Joe Biden.
All I'm suggesting is that unless you think he's doing whatever makes you angry is because he's doing only because he's evil than it's worth the effort to assume that for some reason(s) you may not understand forced him to make an unpopular decision because attacking him only helps the political party that seems at this point to actually be supporting evil imo anyways. #VoteBlue#VoteClimate
Let's take the Section 301 tariffs that impact our #EnergyTransition as an example. Joe Biden was able to get transformative legislation passed in a large part because he tied it together with helping to bring back American manufacturing jobs for compassionate as well as national security reasons.
Whether the cost to Americans from these tariffs greater than their benefit is a hard test to definitively answer so I wonder why so many people seem to know the answer better than Biden's experts?
As you look at this graph, consider Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand solar modules as made in China because they are just assembling them in those countries from Chinese made parts. You cannot look at this graph and not recognize that their monopoly and market share will keep our domestic clean energy industry from developing and growing.
As earlier stated, U.S. climate action as initiated by Joe Biden requires political support ergo we need domestic manufacturing so we need tariffs.
So what will be the impact of the tariffs on the price Americans will pay for solar modules? We will pay more than if we were importing them from a country without environmental, labor and human rights concerns.
Aren't those concerns a good reason to pay more for something? I argue that progressives should think so. What makes this politically crucial is that the tariffs can also be persuasively argued for from an American jobs and national security viewpoint too.
Will the U.S. tariffs reduce the amount of PV panels and EVs that are manufactured? I argue that they won't. The Chinese products that are not sold to Americans will be sold to other countries. Americans are the richest people on the planet so I'm arguing that we can afford it better than they can so let them have them if they want them.
Will this send prices back up to 1970 levels? No, and I don't know how much yet, but look at this graph and you can see there's some room to spare.
What about EVs? I personally can't see that the tariffs are going to impact the trajectory of this curve showing that EV prices have been coming down for the most part fairly predictably and I'm hoping that once our domestic automakers have finished building their new factories and the charging network that Joe Biden is trying to get built is finally ready in a few more years. In the meantime though like with PV, the amount of EVs being produced will not decrease.
So, to conclude sometimes for the greater good it's important to stand with your allies even when they were forced by circumstances to take actions that you wish they hadn't been forced to make so that we have a better chance to make to a better place where those less than ideal policy decisions will no longer be necessary.
Attacking Joe Biden is what the GOP, China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran want you to do.
Do you want to do what is good for those countries or what's good for the USA?
@GreenFire This may sound flippant, but it very much depends who you ask. North Koreans definitely want you to do what is best for North Koreans and there are 30 million fully realized human beings there, most of whom probably think they are very good people (as is human nature). This is the nature of subjectivity that is trippy and hard for people to grasp.
@escarpment
This may be hard for you comprehend, but I'm not expecting for my toots to reach many North Koreans, but I do want you to know that I'd be interested in getting their perspective.
@GreenFire No, I'm American and find North Korea and Iran unpalatable. I just have been wrestling my whole life with how there can be "rogue nations." Think about what that means. Not a rogue cult of a few people who do weird and objectionable stuff. Not a rogue town or enclave. An entire nation- millions strong. Think about the diversity of people who constitute these rogue nations, and how they all think they are good people, just like us.
@GreenFire North Korea is just an extreme example. Think about Trump voters. There are not a few hundred or a few thousand of them. There are millions and millions. They think they are good people. They will not be persuaded.
@GreenFire But even among your audience. The people who are just close enough politically to Biden will agree with what you are saying, and the people who are just left enough to want to vote against him and help North Korea and Russia will do so. And they will not be persuaded either.
@GreenFire The one piece of knowledge I think I possess and am trying to convey is that we live in a deterministic universe and this sort of persuasion effort is part of that deterministic program. It's possible that this persuasion effort has some non-zero impact on the ultimate outcome, as a function of the number of people who see your message, were on the fence or receptive to persuasion, and changed their mind based on the persuasion.
@escarpment@GreenFire I was making a joke about your post sounding like LLM-generated philosophy babble. In a thread about solar panel tariffs, you made a pretty absurd turn at "the universe is a deterministic program."
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