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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Nobody forced china to take America’s trash. They simply undercut other recyclers, making them economically unviable. The same thing happened with rare earths, china didn’t mind to pollute their land to process them, again making cleaner but more expensive means of production economically unviable. This is really the crux of china’s environmental problems: if your competitors cheat by cutting corners in environmental protection while you don’t, you simply don’t exist after awhile. Unhindered capitalism.

Until China starts be more aggressive in cleaning up their environment or the USA decides to sanction against polluting industries, nothing will change.

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It sounds like China is starting to crack down. It's a luxury you have once you're affluent enough. The bootstrapping process is sadly very dirty everywhere that it's happened.

> The bootstrapping process is sadly very dirty everywhere that it's happened.

Not on the scale China's has been. Their environmental destruction has been on such a scale that nearby countries, even those separated by ocean, have greatly impacted air quality and the oceans themselves have been greatly affected.

Sweden wasn't wreaking Poland's skies and waters as it industrialised.

You're underestimating the amount of pollution other countries produced during industrialization. There used to be rivers in the US that were flammable because manufacturers discharges so many volatile effluents into them.

London's "killer fog" is quite famous, and Russia's Lake Karachay still holds the distinction as the most polluted spot on earth.

Sure, China affects its neighbors. China is a big country compared to Sweden.

England was so polluted that the wildlife evolved dark camouflage to blend in with soot covered trees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution

Pulping and paper plants in the Northeast US used to dump all kinds of junk into rivers. You could tell what color paper was being printed by what color the river was. Lots of really toxic things were done by the US on their way to where they are now.

I'm sorry, but this is complete bunkum. Europe has spent spent decades dealing with major cross-border pollution issues. Sulphur emitted by British and German coal power plants was destroying Polish forests until those emissions were curbed by international agreements. Rivers across the continent were running green with algae because of eutrophication caused by fertiliser run-off and discharges of untreated sewage. There are still major issues with cross-border emissions of persistent organic pollutants and heavy metals.

There's nothing unique about China's environmental problems. Every nation in Europe was at least as dirty during their own industrial revolutions. A hundred years ago, every building in urban Britain was jet black with soot. In 1952, the great smog of London killed 4000 people and brought the whole city to a standstill. The urban pollution in modern China would be entirely familiar to any elderly Briton.

China are making great steps to remedy their environmental problems. They're a leading investor in solar, battery and nuclear technology. They industrialised faster than the west and now they're cleaning up the mess faster than we did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Long-Range_Trans...

You should be sorry. China's pork industry alone generates over a billion tonnes of waste per year, accounts for about half of the nitrogen and over 90% of the phosphorus waste put into the South China Sea, is a major portion of world methane pollution and may well be the single largest vector of antibiotic resistant bacteria the world has ever seen. And that's just one industry.

Comparing the scale of this environmental destruction with anything humanity did 100-200 years ago is what is, as you put it, "compete bunkum".

The environmental impacts of the US beef industry are in the same ballpark as the Chinese pork industry. Due to the shift towards feedlot production, it has been getting dirtier in most respects over recent decades. Antibiotic use as a growth promoter is still legal and ubiquitous in the US.

America's CO2 emissions per capita are still more than twice that of China. The Chinese government is clearly taking major steps to curb their resource use and their environmental impact; the current US administration is repealing environmental regulations en masse and has seriously mooted abolishing the EPA altogether.

China has some serious environmental problems, there's no debate about that. The problem is when China is painted as a unique or extreme environmental villain, which is simply untrue. China's environmental regulations currently lag behind the west by a few decades, but they're making meaningful progress in the right direction.

http://www.sustainabletable.org/906/waste-management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

> he environmental impacts of the US beef industry are in the same ballpark as the Chinese pork industry.

The very article you linked put the entire amount of US farm waste at 335 million tons. This is much less than China's 1.3 billion tonnes (AKA "metric tons") for pork alone.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/cd.live/uploads/content_image/conte...

> America's CO2 emissions per capita are still more than twice that of China.

Again, from the standpoint of the environment, there is no extra credit for being absurdly overpopulated.

China emits more CO2 than the US, the EU and Russia combined.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

So if China were to split into 10 different countries it would somehow become an acceptable level?

Per capita is the only equitable measure of pollution.

I certainly agree overpopulation of the earth is a tragedy likely felt for generations, but petty bickering over these very issues is why global leaders can't make any progress in greenhouse gas emissions.

If those covered 10 times as much of the earth in similarly temperate regions, I would be inclined to say yes.

> Per capita is the only equitable measure of pollution.

Would you then believe that if Australia were to have a population of 3 billion and produce double the pollution China currently does, that the continent would be doing well on environmental issues simply because per capita numbers were lower?

In any rational analysis, the environmental strain an ecosystem can withstand is directly related to the size of that ecosystem in comparison to the strain.

The strain an ecosystem can withstand is, unfortunately, not increased in a per capita manner as human population in the ecosystem increases. This may not be equitable. Nature often isn't.

> Sweden wasn't wreaking Poland's skies and waters as it industrialised.

Citation needed.

But just using logic, Sweden has about 10 million people today.

During industrialization it probably had much less (there was a population explosion in Europe after WW2).

Let's say Sweden had 5 million people. Industrializing country of 5 million of people vs industrializing country of 1-1.5 billion is something which is ridiculous to compare.

Imagine trying to industrialize double or triple of Europe from agrarian society again and tell me you think it would be clean and tidy process.

More ridiculous is the idea that a nation deserves extra credit for being ridiculously overpopulated. In China's case, it's doubly absurd given that the CCP strong-armed an already too large populace into having more children for decades before wisely but again brutally reversing course with its famous one child policy.

> "The 1950s census showed that China had 557 million people, and some professionally-trained demographers began urging that policies be put in place to limit population growth. Mao Zedong condemned such views on the grounds that under socialism a large population was a great resource, not a threat. Consequently, some of the most prominent proponents of birth control were labelled rightists and removed from power… by the time Mao died in 1976, China’s population exceeded 900 million."

-Ebrey, Patricia Buckley (2010). The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, p. 327.

In the future, we will likely see an even larger devastation of the environment from India and other countries with large and growing populations.

We can take this both ways: up until the 60s or so the West also viewed more people as a forte. It's just that it started from a lower base, the US started from 100 million people when China was at 300+ million...

Also after WW2 most young men in Europe were dead or maimed so in 50s and 60s governments supported population explosion so Europe would replenish tens of millions of young people it lost in the war and could rebuild its decimated economy.

Well yes, I agree with you. China, India and don't forget about Africa (most countries in Africa now have average age around 20-25 years old and are multiplying populations very quickly).

Not sure what can be done about it. I guess mother nature will sort that out once we run out of resources. It will be like a defensive reaction of an organism, human race might just get purged from the Earth.

> Not sure what can be done about it.

All you have to is educate women and give them reliable access to birth control.

In every country where women are empowered to control their own lives and their own fertility, they have chosen to have fewer children.

We don't need some horrible Malthusian resource crunch, we just need feminism.

I don't want children. I imagine I'm not the only one. Get a dog or a cat or a goldfish or a cactus instead.

99.9% of people disagree with you. You might not be the only one but you are part of tiny minority which doesn't influence anything. For every person like you who doesn't want kids there are hundred families somewhere in developing world with 5-8 children.

Not as many as you might think: Total Fertility Rate drops rapidly as survival rate and economic activity picks up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate#/media/Fi...

Hans Rosling had a great TED talk or two on the subject!

The UN forecast that the global population will reach an absolute maximum of about 11 billion by 2100. Some forecasts are even more conservative, suggesting a peak of 9 billion by 2050. The global birth rate has peaked and is now in overall decline, with most of the developed world being well below the replacement rate. Most of the population growth we'll see over the next century is simply due to more people living longer lives.

The fertility rate in China is massively below replacement at 1.57 births per woman. India is barely above replacement at 2.4. The fertility rate in India today is lower than the fertility rate was in the US in 1970. The global fertility rate has halved in 50 years. Even in the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the fertility rate is declining. The fertility rate in Rwanda has more than halved from 8.4 in 1980 to 3.8 today. As far as I can ascertain, Niger is the country on earth with a persistently high fertility rate.

Population growth is a solved problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E

> More ridiculous is the idea that a nation deserves extra credit for being ridiculously overpopulated.

I don't think the idea is "extra credit", but rather a matter of scale changing the nature of the problem, just as you wouldn't directly compare the problem of networking 10 computers to the problem of networking 1000 computers.

Ha Mao almost sounds as a Catholic priest!

Capitalism saves us all. Children become too expensive so couple's will only have 2. Or none, if Korea and Japan predict a trend.

It hasn't just industrialized though, it's taken on massive scale manufacturing of almost all forms of goods for almost every nation on Earth.

At their scale that's how industrialization works :)

And so far not even that was enough to lift 1/3rd of their population out of poverty...

Sure. Every year they say they will, but it is sort of like a crackdown that lasts for a week or two before everything goes back to normal again. China doesn’t need another crackdown, they need sustained and consistent rule of law.

Yep. Wasn't until the 70s that chemical and nuclear waste stopped being dumped in landfills and the sea.

Oh, it is China's fault to deal with US's problem, by buying wastes in bulk thus delay the innovation? Interesting thought, then Americans should be rejoiced that they finally get the chance to deal with it themselves now.

No, China’s problem is China’s fault.

China should never have done this. There is no international EPA to stop them from pooping in their own yard so to speak.

Well it does signal the end of China’s main selling point for American companies...

The biggest selling point is the Chinese market itself. It is the biggest/second biggest in the world. Money does speak.

> Nobody forced china to take America’s trash. They simply undercut other recyclers, making them economically unviable.

Though conversely, no one forced western countries to send their waste to China without at least having a backup plan for if the economics (or relevant political matters) changed, as they apparently have.

The companies with backup plans would have been outcompeted in the market due to having higher costs than those without backup plans, and so investors would not have supported them.

So now the investors are going to lose out as companies take the hit of setting up new infrastructure in a hurry. You pays your money you takes your choice. Cost now or risk of surprise cost later. Not all investors are short-sighted (though I'll grant you that many are).

The dumb money in 401k, pension funds, passive investments isn't paying that much attention. As long as it keeps up with the market, and the government will print money to ensure it does, it's not possible to isolate and feel the effect of not having the backup plan. And you can't compare the performance of companies that did have a backup with those that didn't because the former never survived or existed, so it's a tough sell to think that far ahead.

That doesn't make it all China's fault though, which is how a lot of discussion about this that I've seen is being framed.

You mean western companies. The market will adapt, it always does. They have to pay more money now, boo boo.

I also have criticism that I often level at "unhindered Capitalism"

But don't you have to admit China is quite socialist / communist and already "hinders" quite a bit? And yet they still rape the environment. Look at what they did with Lake Baikal in a few years. The Gobi desert is expanding. The smog and pollution is worse than LA in the 80s, and so on.

So, what is the answer? "Hindering" capitalism is too vague.

Maybe it's not a capitalist/socialist thing. Maybe it's as simple as good governance vs bad governance.

One thing that's undeniable is that without external intervention (which usually means the state), private industry will tend to pollute as much as it can.

Also - remember strong central government isn't inherently "left" or "right" and the current US view of the left/right spectrum isn't the only possible one. Staring at a 2-axis version of the political spectrum is a good way to break a damaging mental habit.

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