Opinion | China Will Be Thrilled if Trump Kills Americas Green Economy
In its heyday in the mid-20th century, the steel mill in Weirton, W.Va., employed 13,000 people and offered workers a relatively stable blue-collar life.In 2003, Weirton Steel filed for bankruptcy.
Shops downtown boarded up their windows, and young people moved away from the declining Appalachian town.Weirton’s prospects were turning around in May 2023 when I made a trip there as energy secretary.Form Energy, which builds large iron-air batteries to store energy for the electric grid, had just broken ground on a 550,000-square-foot factory.
Today, the production line is humming, and when the plant reaches full capacity, it will employ more than 750 people, primarily locals who were laid off from the mill.Form Energy’s plant is one of nearly 1,000 new or expanded clean energy factories announced across the United States in the past four years, along with about 800,000 new manufacturing jobs — proof that America has begun a manufacturing renaissance.But you can kiss that goodbye if President Trump and the new Congress roll back the laws that made it possible.Our economic competitors are lying in wait to entice companies overseas and turn our innovation into their prosperity.The United States used to be great at building things.
Around the middle of the 20th century we made half the world’s steel and half the world’s cars.By the 1970s, more Americans held manufacturing jobs than ever before.Then, other countries started poaching our technology.
They lured companies abroad with free capital and cheap labor.Back in America, policymakers stuck to their laissez-faire guns.
If employers wanted to move production offshore, who were we to question the free market? But our economic competitors weren’t playing by the same rules.The free market didn’t take our jobs; China and Mexico did, by tempting companies with financial incentives.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your pati...