Yesterday’s post about Nancy Pelosi’s remarks on China belongs to one strand of a larger story that’s coming into focus.  It’s a story about China and human rights, to be sure, but also about what role human rights issues will play in the transition to renewables and in the politics of the transition.

House Republicans on the Natural Resources Committee have already cited reports of human rights abuses in China and in the Democratic Republic of Congo (where Chinese companies control cobalt mining operations) as an argument for boosting extraction of critical minerals here in the US. As the gavel passes in the coming year, their position is likely to attract even more support.

In fact, the 118th Congress could see the emergence of a Green Right coalition: hawkish on China, touting the magic of markets, openly hostile to the administrative state, and more interested in achieving energy dominance (to borrow a phrase from the Trump years) than in paying lip service to a just transition (as some Democrats do).  The incoming Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, plans to “outcompete China on climate:” that phrase sums up a whole political and geopolitical agenda. 

The program could be a political winner: anti-China, pro-growth, industry-captured climate policy may accelerate organized labor’s rightward drift; and the Green Right may even enjoy an uneasy honeymoon period with more left-leaning advocates of permitting reform.

Over the past year or so, as Joe Manchin tried but failed to advance his permitting deal, reformers have shown themselves ready to take an axe to environmental law, they have regularly dismissed public opposition as NIMBY whining, and some of them have done more public advocacy for extractive industry than seasoned lobbyists and flacks could ever dream of doing.