CHINA/ECONOMY/JOBS/TRADE DEALS: “More than 30 of the giant factories once dotted the American landscape, sucking down huge amounts of electricity to produce the metal for car parts, beer cans and aluminum foil. Now there are just five smelters — all facing an uncertain future.
President Trump blames China for flooding global markets with subsidized aluminum. In April, he ordered the Commerce Department to consider quotas or tariffs to shelter American producers from foreign competition. He promised a revival that would create jobs for ‘lots of wonderful American workers.’
But the jobs, for the most part, didn’t go to China. American aluminum was in decline long before Chinese production began to grow. The more complicated truth is on display here, on Iceland’s remote eastern shore.
A generation ago, this hamlet was a herring town, a place where almost everyone made a living from the sea. Today, people work on the flats of the spectacular fjord, where America’s largest aluminum company operates its newest smelter.
Alcoa, formerly the Aluminum Company of America, and another American company, Century Aluminum, have opened factories like this in Iceland, and closed factories in the United States, for a simple reason: Electricity is much cheaper here.
This year, tiny Iceland is on pace to make more aluminum than the United States. So are its fellow hydropower superpowers, Canada and Norway.”
-Binyamin Applebaum, “American Companies Still Make Aluminum. In Iceland.,” The New York Times online, July 1, 2017