Axios climate reporter Jael Holzman with a big scoop this morning:
https://twitter.com/jholz__/status/1615714064205856768
It would be an interesting angle if it weren’t for one minor problem: Republican “China bashing” is neither “new” nor primarily motivated by antipathy to clean energy. Mitt Romney was doing his fair share of “China bashing” back in 2012.
Some clips from NPR in 2012:
Getting tough on China has been part of Romney’s stump speech from the beginning. But last week, speaking in Northern Virginia, he went into more depth than usual…Not only did he promise to label China a “currency manipulator” on his first day in office. Romney also accused China of stealing American technology and intellectual property…On his weekly podcast, he hit the same theme, saying, “In 2008, candidate Obama promised to take China to the mat. But since then he’s let China run all over us.”
And the Romney campaign released an ad accusing Obama of letting American jobs slip away to China.
Some of Romney’s rhetoric, which is commonplace in the GOP today, gets to the actual reason for Republican China skepticism: The Chinese regime has been systematically working to undermine American interests at home and abroad. Insofar as climate policy has implications here, it’s not that the GOP is opposed to climate policy as such — in fact, there’s been movement towards a variety of more modest, common-sense climate policies in Republican leadership — but that it’s opposed to a climate and energy policy agenda that aids and abets that Chinese campaign.
Holzman’s framing of this attitude as a nefarious anti-clean energy Trojan horse offers no substantive evidence other than that Republicans have taken a hawkish posture towards various climate projects with ties to CCP influence. The public rationale for that posture is the CCP’s influence, not the climate policy.
Generally, if you’re alleging that someone’s argument for a particular political position is dishonest or deceptive, you’re expected to offer a reason for why your skepticism is merited. Holzman not only doesn’t provide any deeper reasoning and actually offers various examples of Republicans celebrating non-CCP-linked clean energy projects as evidence of their alleged hypocrisy: “Even [Marjorie Taylor Green] cheered a solar manufacturing project in her district,” she notes. “My reporting doesn’t indicate this will put an end to the GOP’s opposition to low-carbon investments.”
The solar-induced excitement is only hypocritical if you buy the premise that the GOP’s opposition to CCP-linked clean energy projects is evidence of its overarching “opposition to low-carbon investments.” Holzman assumes that premise as an obvious fact. But she doesn’t provide a convincing argument for why anyone else should.