Since assuming the presidency last year, Joe Biden has been a tremendous gift to the communist Chinese government. Whether it’s repeatedly fumbling the ball on Taiwan or shutting down a Department of Justice initiative aimed at identifying and preventing spying activities by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Biden’s administration has been at the forefront of empowering an increasingly aggressive China that seeks to replace the United States as a regional and global hegemon.
On Monday, Biden decided to add another item to his ever-expanding list of policies that strengthen the CCP, with the Democrat president declaring an emergency under the Tariff Act of 1930 that exempts “certain solar cells and modules” originating from several Southeast Asian countries from new tariffs for the next two years.
“In recent years, the vast majority of solar modules installed in the United States were imported, with those from Southeast Asia making up approximately three-quarters of imported modules in 2020,” the emergency declaration reads. “Recently, however, the United States has been unable to import solar modules in sufficient quantities to ensure solar capacity additions necessary to achieve our climate and clean energy goals, ensure electricity grid resource adequacy, and help combat rising energy prices.”
“This acute shortage of solar modules and module components has abruptly put at risk near-term solar capacity additions that could otherwise have the potential to help ensure the sufficiency of electricity generation to meet customer demand,” it added.
While the declaration and Biden’s subsequent abuse of the Defense Production Act to boost domestic solar panel production will undoubtedly evoke cheers from climate alarmists, the emergency order simultaneously undercuts a significant ongoing investigation by the Commerce Department “into whether Chinese companies are circumventing existing tariffs on Chinese imports to the U.S. by setting up shop in [Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia] to finish products whose life begins in China.”
Required by law, the investigation was first launched on April 1 at the behest of Auxin Solar, a U.S.-based solar module manufacturer that alleges Beijing conducts such actions as a means to “avoid the U.S. tariffs” by claiming that the components weren’t manufactured in China.
While Biden’s emergency declaration doesn’t halt the investigation outright, it does allow for CCP-connected businesses to go unpunished for skirting existing tariffs. As reported by NBC News, “Biden’s move Monday effectively takes the issue off the table for two years by ensuring no new solar tariffs on the Southeast Asian countries regardless of what the investigation determines.”
“Assistant Commerce Secretary Lisa Wang said that if the investigation finds new tariffs are in order, they’d kick in after the two-year period,” the NBC News report reads.
Axium CEO Mamun Rashid was quick to blast Biden over the emergency declaration, saying in a statement that the president “is significantly interfering in Commerce’s quasi-judicial process.”
“By taking this unprecedented — and potentially illegal — action, he has opened the door wide for Chinese-funded special interests to defeat the fair application of US trade law,” Rashid said.
The Monday announcement from Biden came a day after Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo revealed that the administration is considering a reduction of tariffs on various Chinese goods “in an effort to combat record-high inflation in the U.S.”
“We are looking at it. In fact, the president has asked us on his team to analyze that,” Raimondo said. “And so we are in the process of doing that for him and he will have to make that decision.”
Under Biden, China Wins and America Loses
Rather than boosting U.S. domestic production of oil and liquified natural gas as a means to lower rising energy costs and provide the country with a reliable source of efficient energy, Biden has instead opted to put the craven demands of radical climate alarmists above the general well-being of the American public. Even if it means granting the communist Chinese government, whose members have committed some of the most heinous human rights abuses in world history, economic alleviation, Biden is willing to throw his own countrymen under the bus in pursuit of his nonexistent, 100 percent renewable energy utopia.
While China’s state-owned solar manufacturers will flourish under Biden’s energy policies, U.S. fossil fuel producers and the American people will continue to suffer under the leadership of a confused, senile man, whose short presidency has completely destroyed the energy independence and sustainability of the United States.