Joan Fitzgerald on US competition with China on green tech

Check out “We Need a Manufacturing Agenda” by Prof. Joan Fitzgerld, director of the Law, Policy and Society Program at Northeastern University and author of Emerald Cities: Urban Sustainability and Economic Development. In this recent editorial for the New York Times, Joan discusses what it’ll take for the US to stay competitive on green energy as China steps up their investment in renewable technologies:

Except for installation and maintenance, all green energy can be outsourced. The good news is that the renewable energy technology evolves rapidly and the U.S. is still better at innovation.

To compete globally in these industries, American policy needs to support innovation that is tied to a manufacturing agenda. The recently approved provisions that require the Pentagon to buy only solar panels made in the U.S. are a step in the right direction. But they have to be accompanied by considerably more investment in research — as much as $5 billion a year.

The U.S. also needs national standards to create more demand for renewable energy, and to require that producers of this energy be based in the U.S. This may violate archaic norms of “free trade” but the reality is that virtually all of our competitors use state policy to create innovation and capture manufacturing advantage. If we disdain these strategies out of some idealized notion of free trade, we leave our future dependent on the whims of other nations’ strategic industrial policies.

You may remember Joan from the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council forum last year, where the audience heard from a panel of government and business leaders about their reactions to Emerald Cities. Here’s Joan discussing her vision for green development in the United States: