US urged to work with technology leader China on transition to clean energy
- The United States can’t be protectionist when it comes to the electric vehicle and EV battery industries, which are now dominated by China, analyst warns
- A panel discussion on the one-year progress of the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s signature climate legislation
A year after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act – which contains over US$300 billion in incentives and tax breaks to increase domestic manufacturing of electric vehicles and self-reliance in clean energy by 2032 – experts say that achieving the ambitious target requires working with China despite calls for cutting all cords with the world’s EV giant.
“The Chinese are ahead of us in technology, they have production capacity that we have not built, they have control over supplies that we do not have. And they know how to do it, they put the whole system together,” said Kenneth Lieberthal, a senior fellow emeritus in the foreign policy programme at Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington.
He spoke on Wednesday during a Brookings panel discussion on the impact and progress of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), US President Joe Biden’s signature climate legislation. Lieberthal warned that for “the US to go in and not deal with Chinese … is simply to delay our transition and our capacity to deal with these problems on our own”.
He said the Biden administration “recognises very clearly” that we have to develop our own capabilities. “But it’s going to take time.”
02:42
Biden tours new Taiwanese chip-making plant in Arizona, fans US-China semiconductor rivalry
China, a global leader in EV technology and battery production capacity, extracts more than 75 per cent of the world’s graphite and processes over 80 per cent of critical minerals like lithium, cobalt and graphite supplies – all essential to EV battery manufacturing.