Equilibrium/Sustainability — Underground abortion network links to Mexico

Today is Monday. Welcome to Equilibrium, a newsletter that tracks the growing global battle over the future of sustainability. Subscribe here: digital-staging.thehill.com/newsletter-signup. 

A clandestine network of Mexican abortion rights activists is vowing to get Texas women access to safe abortion care, The New York Times reported.

While American women have largely had access to legal abortions since the 1970s, Mexican and other Latin American women have not — forcing them to build underground community organizations to disseminate both abortion pills and the knowledge to use them.

Now, with Mexico’s Supreme Court knocking down that country’s abortion ban, they want to bring that knowledge to a newly restrictive northern neighbor. 

“We aren’t afraid. We are willing to face criminalization, because women’s lives matter more than their law,” Mexican activist Véronica Cruz told the Times.

Today we’ll take a look at the drama that unfolded over the weekend, after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) declared that he would not be supporting President Biden’s Build Back Better Bill. Then we’ll explore how the ramifications of this decision could have international impacts — particularly on the U.S.-China race to advance solar energy.

For Equilibrium, we are Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin. Please send tips or comments to Saul at selbein@digital-staging.thehill.com or Sharon at sudasin@digital-staging.thehill.com. Follow us on Twitter: @saul_elbein and @sharonudasin. 

Let’s get to it.

Dems vow to resurrect Build Back Better  

Leading Senate Democrats are calling for an urgent vote on their landmark Build Back Better (BBB) legislative package for right after the Christmas recess.

This comes amid a war of words that followed a surprise Sunday announcement by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) that he would not support the BBB — a stinging rebuke to those in his own party, including President Biden, who had ceded to many of the conservative Democrat’s demands in order to secure his  support, The Hill reported.

In the short term, the BBB’s failure would mean millions of children would face the sudden expiration of the child tax credits that support them, NBC has reported. Over the long term, experts think it places America’s chances of cutting emissions — as well as building the infrastructure needed to make the economy resilient enough to withstand the coming end of fossil fuels — in extreme risk.

First words: “They figured surely to God we can move one person,” Manchin told a local West Virginia radio station, following a scathing press release from the White House after he announced he wouldn’t support the BBB, The Hill reported.

“Well, guess what? I’m from West Virginia. I’m not from where they’re from and they can just beat the living crap out of people and think they’ll be submissive, period,” Manchin added.

A “mammoth bill” at the center of the drama: The bill that Manchin  has opposed includes social policy measures like an expanded child tax credit, which otherwise will run out this month, and which he has refused to support without a work requirement, Insider reported. 

But he has also steadily whittled down the $555 billion “aimed at moving the American economy away from its 150-year-old reliance on fossil fuels and toward clean energy sources,” The New York Times reported.

This would get America halfway to Biden’s goal of a 50-percent cut in emissions by 2030 — but would also threaten the renaissance of coal, the basis of the Manchin family fortune, the Times reported.

Conversely, the failure of BBB would lead the U.S. economic outlook to drop from 3 percent to 2 percent for the next quarter, according to research from Goldman Sachs covered in CNN.

 

SO WHY DID MANCHIN OPPOSE IT?

In his statement on Sunday, he listed reasons from inflation, to national security to the supposed unreliability of renewables in Texas and California.

He also privately told colleagues that parents would use the child tax credit to buy drugs, the Huffington Post reported.

Do those hold water? Depends who you ask. The Wall Street Journal editorial page applauded Manchin, writing that his “decision on Sunday to oppose the Build Back Better Act is a service to the country, sparing it from huge tax increases and new entitlements that would fan inflation and erode the incentive for Americans to work.”

Other reporting contradicted Manchin’s claims. Tax increases in the BBB largely cancel out any impact on inflation, the Times reported. Power failures in Texas and California, for example, were largely caused by the failures of fossil fuel infrastructure in the face of extreme weather, according to NBC. 

A narrow window on climate action: If BBB fails, some experts suggested that the President’s goal of 50-percent cuts in America’s carbon emissions could be achieved single-handedly through executive action, although similar efforts by the Obama administration were tied up for years in legislation and were never implemented, according to The Wall Street Journal.

For Biden to achieve his agenda singlehanded is “not beyond the realm of possibility. But it’s going to be hard, no question,” Anand Gopal, of research firm Energy Innovation, told the Journal. 

So what now? Short-term, angry liberals and progressives from Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) to Senate Finance Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are calling for a renewed push to pass the bill — though most press accounts treated Manchin’s public defection as fatal.

Last words: “If [Manchin] doesn’t have the courage to do the right thing for the working families of West Virginia and America, let him vote no in front of the whole world,” Sanders said on CNN

Bill collapse intensifies US-China solar trouble

The knock-on effects of the Build Back Better battle have stretched far beyond U.S. shores — leading, for example, to a sharp decline in Chinese solar companies that could have benefited from climate provisions in the plan, Bloomberg reported. 

Trina Solar Co. dropped as much as 7.7 percent, while Longi Green Energy Technology Co. fell as much as 3.3 percent in Shanghai, according to Bloomberg.

Why China? Because the Build Back Better Act would have contained $550 billion for climate initiatives in the U.S., which is the world’s second largest market for renewable energy after China, according to Bloomberg. And that decision means a smaller potential market for Chinese renewable energy manufacturers.

These declines exacerbated existing losses for China, after the U.S. began sanctioning additional Chinese tech companies for alleged human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region, where a lot of solar energy development takes place.

Xinyi Solar, which manufactures solar panels in Xinjiang, dropped 9.4 percent at the end of last week, while Xinyi Glass fell 6 percent, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported.

Another wrinkle: U.S. tariffs on imported solar panels are about to expire. The Biden Administration must decide whether to renew these tariffs after a four-year run — pitting climate goals against political will to weaken China’s solar supply chain stronghold, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

Climate activists and solar energy consumers are calling for the elimination of the tariffs, arguing that they make solar panels more expensive than they should be, the Journal reported. 

By slowing the rates at which new solar capacity can be installed, ”tariffs only stand in the way” of efforts to replace fossil fuels, the Solar Energy Industries Association recently told the administration, as cited by the Journal.  

U.S. solar manufacturers don’t agree. In fact, they are petitioning to extend tariffs for an additional four years, contending that without them, the U.S. will surrender the solar panel production business to Chinese companies, according to the Journal.

While relying on tariff-free imports from China would be the cheapest way to achieve a Department of Energy ambition of powering 40 percent of America’s electricity with solar energy, tariff advocates say that doing so could be shortsighted, the Journal reported.

“We have to keep the tariffs to allow the domestic industry to get further scale and further capacity,” Michael Stumo, chief executive of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, told the

‘COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE’ REMAINS ELUSIVE

What’s required to make a solar panel? The raw material, polysilicon, is molded into “ingots” — rod-shaped crystals — which are then sliced into thin wafers that are processed into solar cells, according to the Journal. Those cells are then assembled into the panels that end up on roofs and in freestanding solar farms. 

A pathway to a domestic industry: While the U.S. has no significant capacity to manufacture wafers or cells, many American factories do exist that can produce polysilicon — also used in semiconductors — and a few U.S. companies do still manufacture solar panels, the Journal reported.

This situation, in which the U.S. could conduct the first and last steps of the process, could offer the country some “competitive advantage,” but only with “clear policy support that goes beyond one electoral cycle,” Edurne Zoco, of London-based analytics firm IHS Market, told the Journal.

But China has plenty of internal demand even without the U.S. The country has 75 percent more rooftop space available for placing solar rooftop panels than the U.S. does, a new Chinese government study has found, as cited by the South China Morning Post. 

Thus far, most of China’s solar power is generated at large-scale facilities in remote and less populated regions, such as Xinjiang, Tibet and Gansu, the Post reported.

The provinces of Jiangsu, Shandong and Guangdong account for 30 percent of total suitable rooftops, the authors said, stressing that China’s internal solar “potential is huge,” as the Post reported.

Takeaway: The U.S.-China relationship over renewables remains fraught, and it remains to be seen how much each side will depend on the other amid a global effort to achieve domestic climate ambitions.

 

Motor Monday 

China considers electric vehicle exports, emissions reductions makes transportation healthier, and Biden sets new fuel efficiency standards.

Chinese electric vehicles may roll into global market next

• Sales in China of “new-energy” vehicles have tripled in the first 11 months of 2021 in comparison to the previous year, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. In November alone, new energy vehicles — a collective term for electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids — accounted for nearly a fifth of passenger car sales, as opposed to 6.2 percent for all of 2020, according to the Journal.
• As Chinese car makers continue to make progress at home, they may next transition to global markets, despite never having been a major car exporter, the Journal reported. Already, Sweden-based Polestar, owned by China’s Geely, has been selling Chinese-made cars in Europe, while British carmaker U.S. MG Motor has been making its vehicles in China, according to the Journal. 

On-road emissions reductions led to large health benefits from 2008-2017: study

• Emissions reductions regulations in the transportation sector have yielded significant benefits, equivalent in 2017 to about $270 billion in savings — linked to reduced mortality rates associated with fine particle emissions, a new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found. Deaths related to such emissions would have been 2.4 times as large in 2017 had vehicles been emitting at 2008 levels, according to the study.
• As most vehicle greenhouse gas emissions come from “light-duty vehicles” — or typical passenger cars — the authors concluded that continued health gains will require more stringent policies to decrease emissions.

Biden sets new standard on fuel efficiency

• The Environmental Protection Agency will require cars and light-duty trucks to achieve 40 miles per gallon for model years 2023-2026 — up from the 32 miles per gallon required by the Trump administration in 2020, our colleague Zach Budryk reported for The Hill.
• The measure is the Biden administration’s most ambitious vehicle mileage goal to date, and is projected to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 3 billion tons — the equivalent of about half of total U.S. emissions in 2019.

 

That’s it for today. Please visit The Hill’s sustainability section online for the web version of this newsletter and more stories. We’ll see you tomorrow.