In a long-awaited decision, the U.S. Commerce Department has issued a preliminary decision to apply tariffs to Chinese-made solar modules being imported into the U.S. The tariffs range from 31 percent to 250 percent.

The preliminary tariffs were issued after a lengthy investigation by the Commerce Department into whether Chinese companies are “dumping” solar panels into the U.S. market below cost. These tariffs follow a March decision to issue small countervailing duties on Chinese module producers that are getting illegal domestic subsidies, according to Commerce.

Today’s issued tariffs are as follows: Trina, 31.14 percent; Suntech, 31.22 percent; and 31.18 percent for all other Chinese producers that participated in the investigation. For companies that did not participate, Commerce has slapped a massive preliminary tariff of 249.96 percent.

The combination of these new tariffs and the countervailing duties will add substantial cost to imported Chinese solar panels. With panel prices hovering in the $1 per watt range, it could add around 30 cents a watt to each panel for leading producers, and vastly more for producers that didn’t get involved in Commerce’s investigation.

These are preliminary fines and can be negotiated and changed before Commerce makes a final decision. The solar industry’s trade group, the Solar Energy Industries Association, has called on the U.S. and Chinese governments to negotiate a settlement — potentially resulting in more moderate tariffs:

“The solar industry calls upon the U.S. and Chinese governments to immediately work together towards a mutually-satisfactory resolution of the growing trade conflict within the solar industry.  While trade remedy proceedings are basic principles of the rules-based global trading system, so too are collaboration and negotiations.

“Importantly, disputes within one segment of the industry affect the entire solar supply chain–and these broad implications must be recognized.  In addition, the U.S. solar manufacturing base goes well beyond solar cell and module production and includes billions of dollars of recent investments into the production of polysilicon, polymers, and solar manufacturing equipment, products which are largely destined for export.  If the U.S.-China solar trade disputes continue to escalate, it will jeopardize these U.S. investments.

“Given these broader implications, it is imperative that the U.S., China, and other players in the dynamic global marketplace work constructively to avert or resolve trade disputes that will ultimately hurt consumers and businesses throughout the solar value chain.”

The solar industry has been on edge since last October, when the manufacturer SolarWorld and six other anonymous companies issued a complaint about illegal trade practices. They argued that China’s subsidies were allowing companies to dump panels below cost, thus driving U.S.-based manufacturers out of business.

However, downstream developers have enjoyed falling panel prices — a factor that has allowed the industry to expand 109% in 2011. A group of solar companies known as the Coalition for American Solar Energy has been staunchly opposed to tariffs, saying they’ll dramatically drive up the cost of solar installations in the U.S.

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The Environment Protection Agency’s landmark mercury and air toxics standards, announced in December, would reduce pollutants from coal power plants, saving 11,000 lives, prevent 130,000 asthma attacks and avoid 4,700 heart attacks. But Sen. James Inhofe has found the required 30 Senators to bring the rule to a Senate vote.

In an event with FreedomWorks, a participant posed the question to Inhofe (at 27:00): “Can we really trust companies to protect our natural resources without the institution of the EPA?” Inhofe, a climate denier who has attempted to circumvent EPA rules because they lack “science,” did not think anyone has said the EPA doesn’t have a place:

INHOFE: I don’t think anyone has said you want to eliminate the EPA altogether. If you look at the Clean Air regulations they were good. They worked. If you look back to the Bush administration we had the clear skies act that they refused to act on that would have done away with SO2, NOx, mercury, real pollutants. We’re not talking about that. There needs to be some regulation there but the regulation needs to be based on science and theirs is not based on science.

But Inhofe really doesn’t need to look far to find many Republicans who want to “abolish” the EPA. Last year, ThinkProgress spoke to six current and recent GOP lawmakers aiming to end the agency, and Senate Republicans voted to end the EPA by combining it with the Department of Energy, with 15 GOP co-sponsors. And Rep. Stephen Fincher recently said “We must cut the EPA’s legs off.”

And of course, Inhofe has attempted to block coal and oil oversight — the climate denier has claimed there’s no science for it. However, Inhofe’s interests do not lie with the hundreds of thousands of Americans who would benefit from mercury reduction, but with his oil and coal donors.

Photo: Jefferson Beck/NASA

by Michael D. Lemonick, via Climate Central

The sea ice that blankets the Arctic Ocean each winter peaked in early March this year, as usual, and is now in retreat, en route to its annual minimum extent in September. How low it will go is something scientists worry: Ice reflects lots of sunlight back into space, and when the darker ocean underneath is exposed, more sunlight is absorbed to add to global warming.

That’s the simple version of the story, but things look even worse when you dig into the details. For one thing, all that open water does re-freeze each winter, but it freezes into a relatively thin layer known as seasonal, or first-year ice. Because it’s so thin, first-year ice tends to melt back quickly the following season, giving the ocean a chance to warm things up even more in what National Snow and Ice Data Center director Mark Serreze has called a “death spiral” that could lead to ice-free Arctic summers by 2030.

But it’s worse than that, says a new analysis by scientists at the U.S. Army’s Cold Regions Research Laboratory in Hanover, N.H. “First-year ice is not just thinner, “ said Donald Perovich, lead author of a report in Geophysical Research Letters, in an interview. “We’re also beginning to realize it has other properties.” The most important: New ice is less reflective than old ice, for most of the year, anyway. It absorbs more heat from the Sun, which means it doesn’t just melt faster: It actually speeds up its own melting.

Here’s how it happens, according to Perovich. “Most of the precipitation in the Arctic,” he said, “happens at the end of summer and in the early fall.” When the snow first begins to fall, it builds on the multi-year ice, but disappears onto the patches of open ocean. Those patches eventually freeze, and the snow sticks there as well; it just forms a thinner layer. So for most of the winter, all of the ice, thick and thin, is covered with a brightly reflective blanket. That would be good as far as warming is concerned, except that for most of the winter, the Sun doesn’t rise.

When the Sun finally does rise in spring, it melts the thinner snow first, forming heat-absorbing pools on the surface of the first-year ice. The older ice eventually catches up, forming pools of its own, but since the surface is crumpled, the ponds don’t spread as widely, and they absorb less heat.

In short, the death spiral — where more melting leads to more melting — appears to be even steeper than anyone thought.

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