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Is this part of the price we pay for low cost products made in China? Would we have this pollution in the U.S. if we didn't export our manufacturing?

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The factories causing trouble for Beijing are not that far from the city. If the weather was always favorable, or if there were a mountain range in the way, it wouldn't be as bad. But sometimes when the wind is right, the smog settles under the city's temperature inversion and you pretty much have to wait for a rainstorm to clear it out.

If we removed regulations and built the same dirty factories in the USA, it might not cause the same problems if we put them in better locations.

Sometimes? Like most of winter when the wind in Beijing disappears and an inversion sets in (when the wind comes, it gets really cold but the air is clean, no need for rain). Beijing is comparable to Salt Lake City, which has its own inversion problem but doesn’t have polluting factories surrounding it in Hebei.

Not necessarily, as there are more regulations for manufacturing factory pollution in the US.

China has plenty of regulations to clean up their air. They have a rule of law problem, however, in enforcing any of them. What the wind up doing is blanket crackdowns that are unsustainable and so peter out after a week or two.

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