China joins U.S. climate leftists to undercut American energy security, Heritage report warns

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China is working with American leftists to undercut U.S. energy security by seeking to control green energy sources, according to a new report by The Heritage Foundation.

The report made public Monday is the first of a four-part study examining how, in the authors’ view, Beijing is deliberately co-opting the progressive environmental agenda to subvert American energy dominance of the last decade, a dominance achieved through surging domestic production of natural gas, oil and coal.

By contrast, Biden administration energy policies that favor cleaner alternative sources of energy have increased U.S. reliance on China, the report said.

“The American people deserve to know how Communist China is sabotaging our energy security, which is one of our great strategic advantages,” said Heritage Vice President Victoria Coates. “The [Chinese Communist Party’s] explicit intentions of undermining America’s economy and national security, as well as their catastrophic environmental track record, should concern all Americans—especially climate alarmists who claim they are supporting a good cause by trying to partner with China.”

The Biden administration has adopted many conciliatory policies toward Beijing has part of its strategy of competing and cooperating with Beijing, despite rising tensions on the security and economic front. Climate policy is a particular area where the administration has sought to work with China – among the most polluted states in the world.

For past several decades, China’s leadership has engaged in a plan to undermine the United States as one of the world’s major energy producers and reduce China’s reliance on imported energy sources, the report said.

“China has been executing a plan to reverse these roles by dominating the so-called green movement openly embraced by the political Left,” the report said, noting the administration rejoined the Paris climate agreement — repudiated during the Trump administration — and thus weakened U.S. energy security by imposing high financial costs while giving China “a free ride.”

The China-liberal agenda proposes that humans, first and foremost Americans, give up large-scale energy sources such as fossil fuels, along with carbon-neutral civil nuclear power, in order to reduce carbon emissions, regardless of costs, as a way to slow the planet’s warming trends.

To reach those climate goals, the United States will be forced to heavily increase its dependence on Chinese materials and products for the green energy transition.

“This dependence, and the associated impact, would immobilize the U.S. in an increasingly inescapable trap of China’s making,” the report said.

President Biden and senior aides in his administration regard China as a significant problem but see climate change as a greater threat to the United States. Mr. Biden himself has called climate change the United States’ “maximum threat.”

By contrast, most conservatives view China and its aggressive military activities as a greater peril to U.S. national interests, the report said.

The two views have resulted in radically different approaches to how the United States and the rest of the world will use fuel resources in the coming decades, with the climate activists on the left calling for the use of cheap and subsidized Chinese-built infrastructure such as solar panels, wind turbines, grid storage and batteries for electric vehicles.

Despite the use of Chinese green energy goods, the administration has failed to demand that Beijing curb China’s own greenhouse gas emissions, the report said.

China has been working since the 1970s to shift its energy resource vulnerabilities into a strategy advantage.

“China’s growing control of and influence over global energy supply chains is providing it with new sources of leverage,” the report said. “Worse still, the U.S. is actively contributing to China’s dominance over the green energy domain while failing to exploit the challenges China has in this sector.”

Current administration policies will allow Beijing to dominate future energy markets for decades, the Heritage authors warn.

“This dominance is not inevitable,” the report noted, “but the U.S. must act now to prevent it, and to free itself from its self-imposed Chinese handcuffs” — the children’s toy tube that leaves fingers inserted by the user difficult to remove.

The first report was co-authored by Senior Fellow Erin Walsh and research assistant Andrew J. Harding, both with the conservative think tank’s Asian Studies Center.

“Proponents of the radical climate change agenda are largely not considering China’s harmful role in it. The more the United States pushes for green energies, the more it becomes reliant on China—our top adversary,” the two analysts state.

The Heritage project will study two threats – the Chinese government’s plan to dominate global green energy sources and products and the American Left’s collaboration with China in the name of trying to stop climate change. The next report is expected to assess the defense and military threats posed by U.S. reliance on Chinese energy sources and suppliers.