On May 14, President Biden announced a major escalation of the country’s emerging climate trade war with China, raising existing tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles to 100 percent — a unilateral quadrupling. A few days earlier, responding to reports of Biden’s plans, Donald Trump outdid him, promising tariffs of 200 percent should he win the 2024 election.

5月14日，拜登总统宣布将美中正在形成的气候贸易战大幅升级，把中国电动汽车的进口关税提高到了100%，也就是单方面把目前的关税翻了两番。几天前，在回应有关拜登相关计划的报道时，特朗普不甘落后，承诺如果他赢得2024年的大选，他会征收200%的关税。

It’s not just E.V.s. Five years after blasting Trump for imposing tariffs on Chinese exports, Biden raised them — on aluminum, steel, lithium batteries, solar cells and semiconductors, among other products. Trade protections of this scope would have been almost unthinkable even half a generation ago, when free markets were largely seen by leaders of both parties as opportunities to exploit and tariffs were regarded as an expression of hostile desperation by weak, developingnations. And tariffs would have been perhaps even harder to imagine then in pursuit of global climate goals, which had always called to mind not zero-sum economic competition but virtuous visions of “Kumbaya” cooperation and even global governance in the name of Gaia.

提高关税的不仅是电动汽车。五年前曾抨击特朗普对中国进口产品征收关税的拜登，现在对铝、钢铁、锂电池、太阳能电池和半导体等产品都提高了关税。哪怕在十几年前，这种大范围的贸易保护措施几乎是不可想象的。那时，两党领导人在很大程度上都把自由市场视为可以利用的机会，将关税视为弱小的发展中国家带有敌意的绝望表现。对有利于实现全球气候目标的产品征收关税，那时可能就更难想象了，实现这些目标让人想起的不是零和经济竞争，而是一团和气展开合作的崇高愿景，甚至是以盖娅（希腊神话中创造万物的大地女神，代指地球——译注）之名的全球治理。

But since Trump’s election in 2016, chastened Democratic policymakers have come to see green industrial policy as a kind of one-size-fits-all, policy-and-politics tool — a recipe for addressing the climate crisis, yes, but also for the postindustrial “secular stagnation” of the U.S. economy, for the domestic manufacturing decline, for white working-class resentment and for the geopolitical challenge posed by China. Trade protectionism is now perhaps the closest thing we have to a bipartisan consensus in Washington, but sometimes all those goals sit at cross purposes. “There are few things that would decarbonize the U.S. faster than $20,000 E.V.s,” the M.I.T. economics professor David Autor recently said. “But there is probably nothing that would kill the U.S. auto industry faster, either.” And BYD, a Chinese automaker, just rolled out a model priced under $10,000.

但自从特朗普2016年当选总统以来，经历挫败后想有所改进的民主党政策制定者们已开始将绿色产业政策视为一种通用的政策和政治工具，它不仅是解决气候危机的办法，也是解决美国经济在后工业化时代“长期停滞”、国内制造业衰退、白人工人阶级不满，以及中国带来的地缘政治挑战等诸多问题的办法。贸易保护主义现在可能是我们在华盛顿看到的最接近两党共识的东西，但所有这些目标有时是相互矛盾的。“几乎没有什么东西比售价2万美元的电动汽车能让美国经济更快地脱碳了，”麻省理工学院的经济学教授戴维·奥托最近说。“但可能也没有什么东西能比它更快地扼杀美国汽车工业了。”中国汽车制造商比亚迪刚刚推出了一款售价低于1万美元的车型。

Play a word-association game for “E.V.,” and an American is most likely to say “Tesla” first, but these days it would be better to say “China,” so astonishing has been the growth of the country’s electric-vehicle sector. In 2019, Chinese E.V. exports totaled $400 million; by 2023, they had reached $34 billion, a precipitous 85-fold increase and enough to help make the country, as recently as five years ago an afterthought in global auto exports, today the world’s top exporter of all cars. Nearly 60 percent of all the world’s E.V.s are now sold in China, which is home to three of the world’s four biggest E.V. manufacturers. In late 2023, BYD moved briefly into the top spot, shortly before Tesla issued a mass recall of its Cybertruck and reportedly canceled its plans for an affordable sedan.

如果玩与“电动汽车”有关的联想词游戏，美国人最有可能首先想到“特斯拉”，但现在最好是想到“中国”，因为中国电动汽车行业的增长令人难以置信。2019年时，中国电动汽车的出口总额是4亿美元；到2023年时，这一数字已达到340亿美元，急剧增长了85倍，足以帮助中国成为当今世界上最大的汽车出口国，而就在五年前，中国向全球出口的汽车可以略而不计。现在，全球近60%的电动汽车销售发生在中国，全球四大电动汽车制造商中有三家在中国。比亚迪曾在2023年底短暂成为全球最大的电动汽车制造商，不久后，特斯拉大规模召回了其Cybertruck，并据报道取消了生产一款经济型轿车的计划。

At present, there are hardly any Chinese-manufactured E.V.s even available for sale in the United States, which makes the back and forth over tariffs look pretty performative in the short term. (Symbolically, it has got to be reassuring to American autoworkers, a key swing-state constituency.) But cast your eyes a little deeper into the future, and E.V. protectionism looks less like a market tweak, designed to even the playing field for American automakers, than a market wall. It’s designed to keep Chinese exports entirely out of the United States, at least while the huge industrial stimulus of the Inflation Reduction Act kicks in, and to protect domestic manufacturers from the competition of cars that might be half as expensive or twice as appealing through years in which the country is meant to be transitioning rapidly. (E.V.s are supposed to be half of all new car sales by 2030, according to the White House, up from 7.6 percent last year.)

目前，几乎没有任何中国制造的电动汽车在美国销售，这使得关税问题在短期内看起来更像是表演。（从象征意义上看，它显然是为了让美国汽车工人们放心，因为他们是摇摆州的关键选民。）但如果把目光放得更长远一点，电动汽车保护主义看起来不像是为美国汽车制造商提供公平竞争环境而设计的市场调整，它更像是一堵大墙，目的是让中国的电动汽车出口完全无法进入美国，至少在实施《通货膨胀削减法案》带来的巨大工业刺激措施期间如此。这也是为了保护国内制造商在美国汽车行业被认为正在迅速转型的期间，不受来自售价可能便宜一半或吸引力翻倍的汽车的竞争。（照白宫的说法，到2030年时，美国市场上销售的新汽车中预计将有一半是电动汽车，远高于去年的7.6%。）

Biden wagered an awful lot of first-term political capital on a new green industrial policy, which allocated more than $2 trillion in spending on the climate-focused I.R.A. and the climate-inflected infrastructure law and CHIPS Act. Now, toward the end of his term, he is trying to build a protective moat around America’s budding green industries. From the outside, it looks like a genuine climate trade war. Can it even be won?

拜登在第一个任期内将大量政治资本押在了新的绿色产业政策上，为以气候问题为主的《通货膨胀削减法案》、受气候问题影响的基础设施法和CHIPS法案安排了逾2万亿美元的支出。现在，在第一个任期即将结束时，他正在试图为保护美国新兴的绿色产业修建一条护城河。从外面看，这种做法看上去是一场涉及气候问题的实实在在的贸易战。能打赢这场战争吗？

You have probably heard about the miraculous growth of green energy around the world in recent years — in 2023, renewables for the first time provided 30 percent of all global electricity, and last month, in another first, fossil fuels provided less than a quarter of European Union power.

你可能听说过全球绿色能源近年来的奇迹般增长，来自可再生能源的电力2023年首次达到了全球电力供应的30%，上个月，化石燃料为欧盟国家提供的电力也首次降到了25%以下。

But though the carbon reductions are most impressive in Europe, the green boom is overwhelmingly a Chinese story. More than half of all new solar power installed in the world last year was installed inside China. For wind power, the share was even larger: China was responsible for 60 percent of all new global capacity. In just three years, the country has more than doubled the total amount of solar and wind power installed within its borders; in the United States, what looks like a breakneck build-out over the same period has pushed capacity up by less than 50 percent. Batteries, too: Last year China manufactured storage capacity equal to total global demand.

尽管欧洲在碳减排上做得最引人注目，但绿色繁荣却主要是个中国故事。去年全球新增太阳能发电量的一半以上安装在中国境内。中国的风能发电能力在全球占的份额更大：全球新增风电产能中有60%在中国。在短短三年里，中国境内的太阳能和风电装机总容量增长了一倍多；美国在同一时期看似惊人的扩建只将产能提高了不到50%。电池也是如此：中国去年制造的电池存储容量相当于全球的总需求。

When you move upstream from final products into the green-tech supply chain, China dominates even more. It produces 84 percent of the world’s solar modules, according to a recent report by BloombergNEF. It produces 89 percent of the world’s solar cells and 97 percent of its solar wafers and ingots, 86 percent each of its polysilicon and battery cells, 87 percent of its battery cathodes, 96 percent of its battery anodes, 91 percent of its battery electrodes and 85 percent of its battery separators. The list goes on.

如果从终端产品向下游追溯绿色技术供应链的话，中国的主导地位就更显著了。据《彭博新能源财经》最近的一份报告，全球84%的太阳能组件由中国生产。中国生产世界上89%的光伏电池、97%的太阳能晶片和硅锭、86%的多晶硅和电池片、87%的电池阴极、96%的电池阳极、91%的电池电极，以及85%的电池隔膜。这样的例子还很多。

It is in this context that the United States is undertaking its clean-tech trade war — not from a position of strength or even parity. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, it was in response to plans for an American satellite, which made it into orbit just three months after the Russian launch; later in the Cold War, when American hawks lamented the “missile gap,” they were referring to a fiction, because the Russians had no advantage. Today, China controls more than 80 percent of many essential aspects of the global clean-energy supply chain; the United States controls almost none of it.

正是在这种背景下，美国发动了清洁技术贸易战，而美国目前既不处于实力地位，甚至也不处于势均力敌的地位。苏联1957年发射人造地球卫星是对美国的卫星计划作出回应，美国自己的卫星在俄罗斯发射三个月后进入了轨道；美国鹰派人士在冷战后期哀叹“导弹差距”时，他们指的是假想之物，因为俄罗斯人在导弹上并没有优势。如今，中国控制着全球清洁能源供应链许多重要环节的80%以上；美国几乎不控制任何环节。

Does it matter? To hear Democratic policymakers from Biden and Janet Yellen on down tell it, the answer is yes. To navigate the green transition smoothly, they say, the country needs to avoid growing entirely dependent on China for clean energy in the way we previously relied so heavily on autocratic gulf states for dirty energy. They also want to avoid a replay of the “China shock” of the early 2000s, which decimated manufacturing labor across the industrial Midwest especially, and to combat the problem of “oversupply” from China on American businesses and workers. In a best-case scenario, subsidies and tariffs would together help American companies ramp up E.V. production so rapidly that U.S. manufacturers become a driving force behind the decarbonization of global transportation.

这有关系吗？如果听听拜登和耶伦等民主党派决策者们的说法，答案是肯定的。他们说，为了有效、平稳地应对经济的绿色转型，美国需要避免完全依赖中国获得清洁能源，因为那就像以前严重依赖独裁的海湾国家来提供肮脏能源那样。他们还希望避免2000年代初的“中国冲击”重演，那次冲击摧毁了美国制造业的大部分就业岗位，尤其是中西部的工业地带，他们要防止中国给美国企业和工人带来的“供应过剩”问题。在最好的情况下，补贴和关税会一起帮助美国公司快速提高电动汽车产量，让美国制造商们成为推动全球运输行业脱碳的力量。

But there are risks. To begin with, industrial policy isn’t guaranteed to work, and no tariff is large enough to really reduce China’s global green-tech dominance, because the U.S. market isn’t all that significant to the Chinese. Green self-sufficiency is more achievable, and tariff defenders suggest they are meant to be temporary, allowing the American E.V. industry merely to find its footing. But for how long should we baby domestic industry when it means higher prices on so much of the good green stuff? “A glut in renewables and green products is precisely what the climate doctor ordered,” Dani Rodrik of Harvard wrote this month. As Bloomberg’s David Fickling has pointed out, Trump’s imposition of tariffs on Chinese solar-panel exports in 2018 may have meaningfully slowed American renewable rollout. Will American E.V.s fare any better?

但也存在风险。首先，产业政策并不能保证会奏效，而且，不论多高的关税，都不能真正削弱中国主导全球绿色技术的地位，因为对中国来说，美国市场并不那么重要。绿色经济的自给自足更容易实现，支持关税的人说，关税只是暂时的，是为了让美国电动汽车工业能找到立足点。但在这样做意味着如此之多的绿色好产品价格过高的时候，我们应该对国内的产业支持多久呢？“可再生能源和绿色产品供过于求正是解决气候问题所需要的，”哈佛大学的丹尼·罗德里克本月写道。正如彭博社的戴维·菲克林指出的那样，特朗普2018年对中国的太阳能电池板出口征收的关税也许明显地减缓了美国推广可再生能源的努力。美国在电动汽车方面会做得更好吗？

A few weeks ago, the electric-vehicle analyst Kevin Williams took a trip to Beijing to take the measure of the competition. Williams had gone to the city’s big annual automotive show to test one American perspective on China’s E.V. boom — that it was something between a state-sponsored boondoggle and a mirage of pointless overproduction.

几周前，电动汽车行业的分析师凯文·威廉姆斯为了摸清竞争对手的底细访问了北京。威廉姆斯参观了一年一度的北京车展，以验证一个美国对中国电动汽车行业繁荣的看法——这种看法曾介于那是国家支持的毫无意义的工作和无目标的过度生产幻象之间。

After test-driving a dozen vehicles, Williams thought he had his answer: Chinese E.V.s were simply better and more compelling than their European and American counterparts, he said. “Now that I’ve seen a glimpse of what’s going on in China,” he wrote, “the Western manufacturers, particularly the American ones, don’t seem like they’re trying at all.”

在试驾了十几辆车后，威廉姆斯认为他找到了答案：中国的电动汽车就是比欧洲和美国的更好、更具吸引力，他说。“在我短暂体验了中国正在发生的事情之后，我觉得西方制造商们，尤其是美国制造商们，看起来根本就没有在努力，”他写道。