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US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is in China to discuss economic matters with Chinese economic boss He Lefing and others. The issue, according to the 77 year-old academic economist, is Chinese overproduction, which is detrimental to American industries.
Somebody from the source, DPA, says:
China is flooding the global market with products such as solar panels and batteries. This is causing concerns in the West where companies are unable to compete with cheap products from the Far East.
These two sentences, if true, are an important indicator of what the transition to renewable energy is really all about. It's not saving the world from immanent climate disaster, which would make any effort from anywhere a positive factor but instead a new opportunity for big businesses to cash in on subsidies for development and operation of solar arrays. Cheap solar panels limit the profit potential. The treasury secretary's concern is that the renewable process should be more expensive for the West. A real disaster would be if some alien society arrived on the planet and gave the West solar panels and batteries for free.
David P. Goldman provides an analysis in the Asia Times website.
The Chinese, or anyone else, can't make foreigners buy their products unless they wish to do so. Americans, and others, must find that the purchase of a particular Chinese item makes more sense for them than one produced by their own countrymen. One word for this might be "freedom". The US already has a long list of products including beef cattle, automobiles, sugar, etc. whose importation is heavily taxed or forbidden. In the case of sugar, much of US candy manufacturing has moved to Canada so Red River Valley sugar beet farmers can afford to buy a new 4x4 diesel pickup every year. At this moment the world price for cane sugar is 23 cents/lb. In the US it's 43 cents/lb.
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