Trade war will make us hotter, dirtier and poorer

By Mark Gongloff / Bloomberg Opinion

President Trump’s hostility to any action that would slow climate change is so all-consuming that it even infects his economic policy.

The effect may be accidental, but his “Liberation Day” tariffs threaten to hurt clean energy just as much as his direct attacks on green finance and environmental protections. The result will be damage to the same economy Trump purports to be restoring to greatness.

The first effect of Trump’s tariff-palooza is obvious: High duties on imports from China, Vietnam and elsewhere will raise prices on solar panels, batteries and other vital components of the clean-energy transition, making it less profitable to buy and deploy them. Fewer wind farms, electric-vehicle charging stations and the like will get built as a result. “A less productive U.S. economy, which must pay higher prices for key inputs, is one that can spare fewer resources to address climate change,” Alex Muresianu, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit think tank, told Climate Brief.

Still, if the U.S. were dedicated to boosting domestic capacity to make this stuff, then things might eventually work out just fine; though we’d have years of higher greenhouse-gas emissions heating up the planet while we waited for workers to be trained and factories to open their doors.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-trade-war-will-make-us-hotter-dirtier-and-poorer/