Those of us who have been puzzled by the over-the-top opposition of the US Chamber of Commerce to any effort to encourage the development of alternative energy in America, and their ranting against attempts to deal with climate change, may have found the answer in an article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in Huffington Post on 20 November 2009.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
According to Mr. Kennedy:
"....a treacherous U.S. Chamber of Commerce, always willing to put its obsequious scraping to Big Oil and King Coal ahead of its duty to our country, has battled every effort to accelerate America's transition to a market-based de-carbonized economy."
The Chamber claims that trying for energy independence puts us at a disadvantage with the Chinese, but the exact opposite is true. By hamstringing America's move to energy independence, the US Chamber is actually helping the Chinese to "steal America's once substantial lead in renewable power... (and) will soon make us as dependent on Chinese green technology... as we have been on Saudi oil." |
| China spends 39 percent of its large economic stimulus package on greentech, compared to 12 percent of the US stim package; by 2013, says Kennedy, greentech will be 15 percent of Chinese GDP. By 2020 the US will triple its wind generation of power, but China's will go up twelve-fold. By 2020 the US will increase its solar generation by 33 percent, whereas China's will go up by 20,000 per cent.
While percentage increases do not provide a unit-for-unit comparison, the trend betrays what the canny Chinese, who take a long view, are up to. Chinese companies are now flooding the US market with cheap solar panels, "devastating the American manufacturing sector that was gearing up to create tens of thousands of US jobs." BP Solar, Evergreen, and General Electric have all announced the closing of factories in the US and their intention to outsource production of solar panels, mostly to China. Example: Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, gets more than 25 percent of its power needs from a 70,000-panel, 14.2 megawatt array of solar panels, saving the Pentagon $1 million annually---- the panels are manufactured by China's Suntech Power.
For years America led the world in wind installations, and even dominated the manufacture of wind turbines. Today, of five leading wind turbine manufacturers, only one is American. China's Shenyang Power Group has contracted to supply all the turbines for the largest wind project in the US on 36,000 acres in west Texas, the largest wind project in the US. The project will create 2,800 new jobs---- 2,400 in China and just 400 in the US. China is also positioning itself to take away our lead in batteries and electric cars, not to mention already being far ahead of us in automobile fuel efficiency.
So much for creating green energy jobs to pull us out of the Great Recession. We are creating more jobs in China than here at home, and the reason is Congress' dithering, spooked by the relentless anti-green energy campaign of the US Chamber of Congress and their flunkies in Congress.
Kennedy says the development of alternative energy and its manufacturing infrastructure is the "New Arms Race," and China is cleaning our clock. Lu Jixiang, chief executive of Shenyang Power's controlling shareholder, said about the Nellis AFB power array, "This is just the beginning...(the United States) is an ideal target." While Kennedy needles Congressional Republicans, saying they will "soon recognize that the arms race of the 21st century is already in process" with the very communist nation the Republicans have loved to hate, he does not pursue the thought further, and connect the rest of the dots.
Whether it is zeal to support the mega-profits of its most powerful members (Big Oil and King Coal), or a genuine doubt about climate change and an instinctive anti-science, anti-Democratic Party bias, the result is the same: the US Chamber is actively sabotaging America's national security in favor of a hostile power, and outsourcing by US corporations does the same thing. Which raises another question: is the US Chamber actually acting as an agent of that power? |
