President Donald Trump’s attempt to create U.S. jobs by taxing solar panel imports could backfire.
That’s according to the CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association trade group, who says it’s domestic workers that will feel the pain.
“We have been the fastest growing form of new energy...and this is putting the brakes on that crazy growth,” Abigail Ross Hopper told Cheddar in an interview. “These are not people who are looking for what nationality the company they work for is. They just want to feed their families and pay their mortgages. And those are the people whose jobs are at risk.”
Earlier this week President Trump signed a law that would impose a 30 percent tariff on imported solar panel and sells, a move the administration says will encourage domestic manufacturing.
But the SEIA says the vast majority of the 260,000 Americans employed in the industry work in peripheral industries like installation. Ross Hopper says the bill will result in 23,000 layoffs this year and delay or cancel billions of dollars of investment in the sector.
She also says it might dissuade U.S. consumers from going green.
“Most [businesses and consumers] want to choose solar because it saves them money,” she said. “This decision changes that calculus.”
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/solar-power-in-america).
The coronavirus outbreak has triggered a stunning collapse in the U.S. workforce, with 10 million people losing their jobs in the past two weeks. Meanwhile, the number of confirmed infections worldwide has hit 1 million, with more than 50,000 deaths, according to the tally kept by Johns Hopkins University.
Stock indexes turned wobbly on Wall Street Thursday, giving up most of an early gain driven by a surge in oil prices.
As President Trump prepared to meet on Friday with seven U.S. oil and gas executives at the White House, he announced today that Saudi Arabia and Russia had agreed to enormous cutbacks in their countries' crude production.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo made a plea to manufacturers in the state to step up and produce supplies desperately needed to combat the coronavirus outbreak.
The Payroll Protection Program, the centerpiece of the three small business lending programs outlined in the CARES Act, is designed to help businesses keep their employees at a time when income is mostly on pause but expenses are not.
The Democratic National Committee is delaying its convention until the week of Aug. 17. The move comes after prospective nominee Joe Biden said he didn't think it was possible to hold a normal convention in July because of the coronavirus.
The automaker revealed that it will be able to produce 50,000 ventilators in the next 100 days. The ventilators' design has been simplified by the private medical company Airon for easy set-up and quick usage in emergency settings.
It’s April 1, and if you rent your home, chances are good that your rent is due today. But with millions of Americans out of work due to coronavirus, those regular bills are even harder to manage.
President Donald Trump is resisting calls to issue a national stay-at-home order to stem the spread of the new coronavirus. This is despite his administration's projections that tens of thousands of Americans are likely to be killed by the disease.
In a letter to CEOs of DoorDash, Grubhub, Instacart, and Uber, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called on the employers to provide gig workers with "basic rights and protections" as they perform "essential delivery work."
