re: Is Reaganomics and free trade officially dead?

I can tell you on very good authority that the DoD is treating solar and battery tech as a national security issue. We need to jumpstart our domestic industries to safeguard energy independence, but that is increasingly difficult to do when China is over-producing cheap-arse panels and batteries using low-quality materials and forced labor.

Even the non-Chinese solar companies are getting materials from China. Canadian Solar? China. Maxeon? China. The only exception I know of is First Solar, which has an advanced design and explicit anti-slavery commitments. They just opened major facilities in Louisiana and Alabama. This company (and others like it) is who we're trying to protect.

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You can say the same thing about battery tech. Biggest three companies are Chinese. They overproduced during 2021 and 2022 and caused the worldwide price of lithium to crash in 2023. Australia and Chile in particular, who are the world's top producers of lithium, basically took a body blow over lithium last year. Not to mention the biggest EV battery producers outside of China which happen to be Panasonic (Japan), LG (Korea), and Samsung (Korea). We're protecting them, too ...

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