Trump tariffs spark turmoil: The Reengineer Monitor #21

Natural building materials, record EV sales - and more!

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio.

SPECIAL: Trump tariffs

This week’s news has been completely dominated by the furore over US President Donald Trump’s hefty import tariffs, which he planned to impose on a string of countries that trade with the US. (He has since rolled back many of the higher tariffs while negotiations take place, though at the time of writing the tariff on imports from China remains at 145%.)

Such tariffs would have far-reaching implications for the energy transition. The US relies heavily on imports of solar panels, for example, so slapping large tariffs on those imports would likely make solar array installations much more expensive in the US. The same could be true for wind turbines.

Canary Media has a great analysis of these and other such effects.

But US tariffs wouldn’t just impact the domestic energy transition. They are already altering policies and markets in other countries, too. The UK, for instance, weakened its electric vehicle (EV) targets in response to Trump’s actions.

A detailed report from Carbon Brief lays out various other impacts. For example: those on China’s solar manufacturing industry. Some countries, such as Canada, are now moving to diversify their trading partners given the growing percpetion that the US has become an unreliable one.

Other analysis argues that, while significant, Trump’s tariffs are not powerful enough to stop the global energy transition. It is arguably moving too quickly, and at too big a scale, for that.

Plus, there could be surprising price reductions on certain goods, such as heat pumps, elsewhere in the world. Should it become harder to sell such technology to the US, it is possible that countries exporting heat pumps will offer better prices to consumers in Europe. Separately, spying an opportunity, the EU is currently in talks with China to remove tariffs on Chinese EV imports and instead set minimum prices for vehicles in response to the tariffs debacle.