[kragen]

I live in Argentina, so my belief in "the system" is that it's comprehensively rigged. Also, a friend of mine was raped by the police under the US-backed last Argentine dictatorship, so I'm not super enthusiastic about dictatorships like the PRC, nor about LatAm being inside the US's sphere of influence.

This dumping stuff is nonsense. If you investigate more deeply than reading PR, you'll come to the same conclusion. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43463872 for more details on that.

If "being china's bitch", as you put it, were the alternative to war, it would not be "a worse option than war", because the PRC has ICBMs and 600 nuclear warheads. War with China would mean every major US city and every Chinese city becoming a radioactive wasteland. There are people who would prefer that to some kind of unfavorable economic situation, but I do not think those people merit a place in public discourse.

What I'm advocating, however, is not that the US accept an unfavorable economic situation and give up autonomy and independence; it's that the US cease to force an unfavorable economic situation on itself by sabotaging its own energy supply, which is fundamental to both transportation and to all forms of heavy industry. The foreseeable energy future is solar, and US policy is built on wilful blindness to that fact, a blindness which will cripple its industry's capacity to compete with China over at least the next three decades.

[_bin_]

China's trade abuses are insane. Firstly, china has better than 80% marketshare. Most people agree that a monopoly of this size is net corrosive to innovation and competition. What's more, china massively subsidizes industries she prefers. Both in terms of direct subsidies, but also in that the PBOC can direct any and all banks through the country to offer privileged terms on loans or capital. This often doesn't factor into western analyses because it's simply not a tool we use. It's also not the sort of thing WTO/GATT rules are written to consider, see prior comment about the system not being set up to deal with chinese. You're right that there's less evidence of explicit dumping under international law, though since the domestic chinese solar market is so much smaller that's not an entirely meaningful number, but I was using it more as a colloquialism people would recognize to indicate state-backed overcapacity to knock out competition than as a legal term of art.

And you're assuming being stuck under the thumb of an illiberal regime hostile to our beliefs and way of life, a regime with a long history of violating basic liberties, of mass murder, and of ethnic (han) supremacy, would stop at trade concessions. I don't believe we could reach a point where we could make tolerable policy changes to appease the PRC.

I don't think it's an issue of us being blind. There are plenty of contributing factors. For one, we are terrible at industrial policy and it's ridden with recapture. E.g. Ford shutting down a battery plant because the UAW demanded (and gov't generally supported) the fact that they'd have to re-hire and re-train tons of UAW employees at the new factory. This is objectively not the way to handle what we believe to be a critical energy supply issue. The fact that it's become incredibly difficult to produce solar panels or batteries competitively, both due to higher wages and more stringent regulations than one would find in china. This is exacerbated by decades of conspiracy to wink-and-nod at illegal immigration suppressing investment in automation, meaning catch-up would be painful and take time. Etc.

There's also the fact that, as it stands now, we cannot replace our grid with renewables. It's also much easier to make a large chunk of it nuclear, but the environmental/clean energy groups have mostly been captured by nuke-hating tree-huggers for half a century now. Objectively you do not want to make all your generation wind/solar because your storage requirements are much higher, because the LCOE numbers people use in their calculations (Lazard's are popular) are notoriously bad, and because storage tech either isn't there yet or is cost-prohibitive.

I am very frustrated by people who 1. try to reduce this to "one simple thing" that they happen to support, and likely supported long before and apart from current issues, 2. people who see it as an opportunity for recapture, and 3. the head-in-the-sand denialists who just don't know or care that America's position and people are threatened by the way things are headed.

[ZeroGravitas]

Your last two paragraphs are almost perfect satire.

Renewables don't work. Nuclear is much easier. It's the environmentalists at fault. LCOE is notoriously bad. Storage doesn't work.

Also, you're angry at people who are head in the sand denialists who don't realise or care that America is under threat.

The person you're discussing this with is totally correct. America is throwing away it's future with this approach to energy. And you are a perfect avatar of the people enthusiasticly commiting this self-destruction.