Geopolitical competition seems to be leading away from the greening of global production. Major players like China, the European Union, and the United States are all trying to spur green industries like electric-vehicle production in their own territories and with their own companies. Taken as a whole, this has the effect of stimulating production and innovation, which should be beneficial for the planet. But it also raises prices by directing capital to redundant production, and it establishes a kind of green protectionism that seems certain to have unforeseen consequences. Successful investing in an industry whose major players include several antagonistic and powerful state entities is difficult at best.
The most interesting recent development has been the US decision to pressure Mexico not to welcome Chinese investment in electric-vehicle production. Mexico has, of course, benefitted from US-China competition in that companies like Tesla, Samsung, and Nissan have shifted production away from China to Mexico as part of global de-risking. Note that Samsung and Nissan are not US companies. The great appeal of Mexico apart from its workforce is proximity to US consumer demand. By pressuring Mexico to keep Chinese EV companies like BYD, Chery, and SAIC at arm’s length, the US is using the size of its consumer market as a political weapon in foreign policy. The policy goal is to deprive Chinese companies, private or not, of markets. (BYD is private, Chery and SAIC state-owned.)
The European Union has been doing something similar, having become alarmed last year at the growth of European demand for Chinese EVs and the barriers erected by the Biden administration to European companies prospering in the US market. Europe’s car manufacturers don’t want to lose their future domestic market to Chinese competitors. Biden moves to protect US domestic EV production deprived the Europeans of a crucial export market at the same time that Chinese manufacturers were selling high-quality EVs to European drivers at a 30% discount to European prices. These political-economic factors have combined on the Continent with a growing distrust of Chinese tech companies and China — rather, the Chinese Communist Party — more generally. The EU raid this week on Nuctech, a Poland-based Chinese scanner manufacturer long held in suspicion by Western China analysts, was made on economic grounds but has a strong security aspect as well.
Many Chinese argue that the root of these EV conflicts is that Chinese companies are simply better. Europeans and Americans counter that Chinese EV companies are state-backed, which is certainly true, such that the competition is unfair. None of this is wrong exactly but it misses the macro point: the major Western economies embraced extended global manufacturing supply chains and China did not, with the result that China now has innovative vertically integrated large-scale manufacturing companies that can compete globally. Because so many of those supply chains ran through China, the US and the EU are playing catch-up, and they are weaponizing their own consumer populations as well as alliances (as with Mexico) to do so.
One result is likely to be chronic high prices for North American and European electric vehicles, which means (in the absence of Chinese imports) a slowdown in EV adoption — which is already occurring. That in turn means a slowdown in carbon reduction. China’s aggressive, state-led pursuit of green industries was driven, to a great extent, by a desire to innovate out of a global climate crisis that has hit China quite hard. China’s pre-eminence in solar panels was initiallya responseto German rules on energy efficiency that could not be addressed with European products. But US-China competition has now transformed an environmental policy into something that has anti-environmental results. One can hope that all this duplicative effort will result, over the long term, in electric-vehicle and other green industries that will be able to expand around the globe and save the planet. But picking winners in such a roiling political environment is very hard, as Tesla’s investors will have been reflecting this week.
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