Tariff Tango Comes To Chapel Street

Vlad Alexandrescu explained to Connecticut’s junior senator that his water-sport-pump business has a problem.

Namely, that it’s caught in the middle of the U.S.-China trade war.

Alexandrescu shared that concern as part of a Q&A during a campaign stop by U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy Friday afternoon.

Murphy, who is seeking a third six-year term in office, toured downtown ​“maker space” MakeHaven and climate-tech hub ClimateHaven before heading out to the West Hills community center, The Shack.

He is facing challenges from Republican candidate Matthew Corey, Green Party candidate Justin Paglino, and Cheaper Gas Groceries Party candidate Robert Hyde in the general election on Nov. 5. (Click here for the Independent’s interview with Murphy on Friday about the latest with the presidential election.)

At both stops on Chapel Street, Murphy talked to MakeHaven and ClimateHaven members about their work, and heard pitches from the organizations’ leaders on why their spaces areimportant and deserving of federal support. 

He also spoke with Alexandrescu, a MakeHaven regular who uses the space as a lab for his watersports technology company, Aeolian Kitesurfing.

Here’s his problem.

After a decade of work, he’s finally able to sell his signature product, a hybrid electric/manual pump marketed for water-sport toys. Currently, Aeolian buys pumps from China, then modifies them at MakeHaven, before selling them online and through a series of American and European distributors. 

But now, he sees Chinese factories selling pumps directly to consumers through Amazon, cutting out wholesalers, distributors, and inventors like Alexandrescu. 

“The money leaves our market, it goes back to China and doesn’t get reinvested in the community,” he told Murphy. ​“So what is to be done to protect us a little bit?”

Murphy acknowledged Alexandrescu’s concerns, describing the last few decades of the country’s unfettered free trade policy as ​“40 years of a really bad bet.” Free trade, Murphy said, has hurt American workers and failed to pressure countries like China to democratize. Instead, the senator suggested, it is time to pursue an industrial policy that includes trade protectionism and subsidies for domestic industry.

But achieving this won’t be easy, Murphy added.

“All of the major economic players have made their money based upon the business model that allows Chinese factories to ship directly to American consumers,” Murphy told Alexandresu. ​“To interrupt that, either by tariff on a foreign product or by subsidy to the American product, is revolutionary for a lot of the folks that have made out very well by neoliberal global economics.”

Alexandresu responded with a different proposal, suggesting restrictions on companies with primarily foreign ownership instead of tariffs on specific goods. 

Murphy seemed more hesitant on this proposal, calling it ​“deeply antithetical” to the way the American economy has traditionally run. He said that the federal government might intervene in specific industries with national security applications, like semiconductor or medical supplies, but not much more.

But Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and potential Harris administration secretary of the state contender, did seem to share Alexandrescu’s skepticism about economic integration with China.

“Their entire business model is based upon stealing our intellectual property,” Murphy said. ​“We spent several decades believing that we could sort of threaten them or nudge them into respecting American intellectual property, not understanding that the entire model of the Chinese economy was based upon suckering us into integration with them so that they could steal our IP.”

Reached by phone on Tuesday, Alexandrescu said he left the brief conversation wanting to sit down with Murphy to further discuss putting restrictions on companies with foreign ownership in cases where there’s a clear American counterpart. 

“I did like to see Senator Murphy in places like MakeHaven, a place that is near and dear to my heart,” Alexandrescu added. 

Murphy Sees Green

A focus of Murphy at both stops was how Connecticut can become a leader in the new green economy, including decarbonization technologies.

During his MakeHaven tour, Murphy stopped to chat with J David Wright, who showed the senator his prototype for a ​“super wood” insulator he built in MakeHaven’s woodshop.

Wright, a physicist by training, designed the prototype while building his own house, in an attempt to both reduce heating costs and create a more renewable alternative to foam or cellulose insulation. He said his calculations show that windows using his insulation technology prevent as much carbon dioxide leaking as a tree absorbs in a year — about 48 pounds of CO2.

“We’re literally throwing money out the window, throwing carbon out the window, throwing fuel out the window,” Wright said. ​“This can prevent the emission of the carbon in the first place.”

Now, he told Murphy, he is working to win a grant from New York State to put the product up for third-party testing, and eventually make it available.

Upstairs, Murphy met with several green company founders, part of the more than 20 members of the green economy incubator ClimateHaven, according to the organization’s new president and CEO, Justine Lee. 

“Our entire Connecticut delegation’s support has been really instrumental in getting us to where we are now,” Lee told the Independent. ​“We appreciate the opportunity today to introduce [Murphy] to some of our startups, showcase the work that they’re doing and then the ways in which we’ve supported them.”

Conor Rooney, the co-founder of Oxylus Energy and one of ClimateHaven’s earliest members, took the opportunity to promote the incubator.

Oxylus is working on technology developed and licensed from Yale that more efficiently and cheaply converts point-source CO2 emissions, usually from industrial sites, into liquid fuels. The ​“e‑fuels,” primarily methanol, can then be used instead of fossil fuels for airplanes and large ships. 

When the founders arrived at ClimateHaven in August 2023, they had one reactor. Now, after raising over $4 million in seed funding, they have a team of six and a few thousand-square-foot laboratory in Branford where they’re testing their reactors.

“ClimateHaven really kind of helped us get from zero to one,” Rooney told Murphy. In a separate interview with the Independent, Rooney credited ClimateHaven with helping them build a business model, and said that having the space was ​“really critical” for their ability to recruit investors.

Also at work during Murphy’s visit was Dylan Judd, who in addition to getting his chemistry PhD at Yale is working to tackle the problem of waste from wind turbines. 

Standing over a dissected turbine blade, Judd explained to Murphy that federal tax incentives to replace turbines every five to ten years has led to a massive waste problem, with 43 million tons of wasted turbine blades just sitting in landfills by 2050.

To fix this, Judd’s company Windloop is developing technology to break down turbine blades and make them recyclable — potentially as future wind turbine blades.

“[The waste] is a massive problem,” Judd told the senator. ​“You see these landfills kind of build up in communities across the U.S., especially in Texas, so we’re just trying to be part of the solution.”