In an article titled “The World’s Dumbest Trade War,” Slate’s Will Oremus offers a thorough accounting of the ridiculous policy of imposing tariffs on cheap solar panels from China.

Remember, the U.S. government wants Americans to buy solar panels, and it subsidizes those purchases through rebates and incentives. The Chinese government wants Chinese companies to build solar panels, and it subsidizes their manufacture. And yet rather than celebrate this fortuitous arrangement, the world’s top economic powers find themselves on the brink of a trade war that could cripple a promising industry in both countries, kill jobs, and hurt the environment all at once. It’s a terrible trade-policy trifecta.

Trying to make solar panels more expensive to aid domestic manufacturers defeats the whole purpose of having domestic manufacturers in the first place. It aptly demonstrates the folly of green industrial policy—subsidies and tariffs to create and then maintain “green jobs”—as a rational environmental policy.

Fortunately, some countries have recognized the harmful impact of trade barriers and called for free trade in environmentally friendly products like solar panels and wind turbines. This initiative may be included in some form in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. Last year, Simon Lester and I wrote a paper explaining that any such endeavor should not exclude antidumping and anti-subsidy duties like those being used here by the United States.

What’s more, as Oremus aptly points out, these duties not only reduce the viability of green energy, they harm domestic businesses that install solar energy equipment.

Unfortunately, this phenomenon is in no way unique to solar panels. The U.S. imposes a great number of antidumping and anti-subsidy duties on imports that U.S. manufacturers rely on as inputs. Check out this video to learn more about America’s economically irrational and destructive antidumping laws: