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Comment by DataWorker | Hacker News Reader

China is the number one threat to the US and to the future of the planet. We ignore it and trade with them out of pure greed. It’s immoral and there should be more sense of public shame. Doing business with China makes you an enemy of freedom and the environment. Doing business with them is no different than going out and poaching the endangered rhinos yourself.

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Nationalistic flamewar is not ok here and we ban accounts that do it, so please don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Doing business with China has also helped lift 500 million people out of extreme poverty in the past 35 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China

And because of this government, tons of those people lost their jobs and had to go back to the rural farms, where they will go into extreme poverty again. The same government that made these people suffer through 40 years of pain, 70 years ago.

It was American capital and knowledge that lifted these people out of extreme poverty.

Some seem to think the goal of all humanity should be to “lift everyone out of poverty.” Even if it destroys the planet and leads to massive humanitarian crises and ever greater suffering, putting dollars in wallets, that’s the point of it all. Homo economicus.

"poverty" in this case is not "below the US poverty line". "poverty", when used in this context, means failure to satisfy the physiological layer of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: starvation, lack of decent shelter, disease, etc. The suffering from "poverty" in this sense is unimaginable to me. The fact that it's more or less hidden and not a big-ticket media item doesn't make it less of a humanitarian crisis or reduce the suffering involved.

Or put another way, we're not talking about putting dollars in wallets. We're talking about putting food in children's mouths, clothes on their backs, roofs over their heads. Maybe even some education in those heads. Yes, I just used a "think of the children" argument, sorry.

Aren't you using a laptop/phone or something to type this comment on? Seems a bit hypocritical to me.

Seriously, every single one of us being on HN is the product of being stupidly lucky to be born where we were and be typing on whatever we are.

Millions of potential Einsteins have lived and died as subsistence farmers or worse throughout human history. If any of us were born fifty thousand years ago we would not be savant geniuses bringing about the agricultural era - if we even lived to adulthood (highly unlikely) we would have spent our days chasing gazelle to exhaustion to survive just like the rest of mankind.

This is the kind of problem that individual action cannot solve. It's well modeled by tragedy of the commons. Similarly I'd vote for banning slaughter of animals for meat, but in the meantime am not a full-time vegetarian any longer.

According to this, the greatest culprit isn't China. It's the industrial revolution.

When did lifting millions out of poverty lead to “massive humanitarian crises and ever greater suffering”? How callous and sheltered do you have to be to say something like that?

Surely the absurdity of someone like you telling the world’s poor that they ought to stay poor doesn’t escape you?

>How callous and sheltered do you have to be to say something like that?

Keep the dialogue civil.

It turns out that industrializing a society creates a lot of pollution. That pollution, as we've recently found out, is responsible for "the massive humanitarian crises and greater suffering" we are going to experience as impoverished nations continue to industrialize (ie. get lifted out of poverty).

See: IPCC

Your premise is wrong. This is called the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC):

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

The solution to pollution is more economic development, not less. This becomes even more true once demographic transition effects (like declining birth rates) start to kick in.

You don't understand what you are talking about.

EKC works with pollutants that have short term, acute consequences. Think sulfates, nitrates, carbon monoxide, etc.

EKC has not been proven true with pollutants whose effects are less concentrated and whose effects take longer to realize (CH4, CO2, etc). The catastrophes I'm referring to have little to do with the paper you cited.

According to https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2011/0..., it seems that there is a positive correlation between GDP per capita and carbon emissions per capita at first, but the correlation stops after that and becomes neutral. In the UK and US, for example, carbon emissions per capita remained roughly constant over a 50 year period even as GDP per capita increased significantly.

Area under the curve.

What do you mean?

If you look at the number. It's clear that historically the US has done just as much if not more damage to the environment as China has.

Case in point: cumulative greenhouse gas emission

http://www.climatechangenews.com/files/2015/06/Historic-emis...

On a per capita basis, China is doing less harm to the environment than those in the US.

Your argument boils down to "nobody is perfect, so nobody has any room to criticise." The fact is that everyone makes decisions which contribute to these problems, but everyone is also responsible for trying to be better. China certainly has the right to criticise the US for our foreign policy and for our backsliding on climate change. However we have the right to criticise China for their killing of critically endangered species for medicine that doesn't work.

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