Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, but what I meant by my response is that, in this hypothetical scenario, the products themselves are fine. Nice, clean, safe, recyclable, whatnot. It's the manufacturing process that's polluting. You can't ban a product from being sold in your country on the grounds that manufacturing it in another country is an ecological disaster. Meanwhile, all those jobs are highly desirable (not just for your personal benefit as a politician, but also for the benefit of your constituents and your nation's economy). So there's an incentive to relax the environmental protection rules a little bit. A corporation can use this to play countries off each other - if you stand fast by your existing rules, and your neighbour does not, all the plants and all the jobs and all the economic boost will go to your neighbour, making your country weaker on the international scene.

There's no bribing involved in this scenario. Just plain market competition at nation-state level.

Well, it depends on the size of the country, does it? And on the mindset of the population.

If the EU tells you you can't produce anywhere in the EU because of how dirty your factory is, you can still produce it in the US or Russia and then ship it to the EU. However, your supply lines have just gotten more complicated, expensive, and error prone (because of distance) - so that's one part of the equation that a company has to take into consideration as well.

On top of that, I'm fairly sure there are quite a few Europeans who will applaud politicians who stand up against polluting or otherwise unethical companies, and who look down on (and not vote for) politicians who do shady deals with polluting companies.

So, as always - it's not so simple, and there's more than one dynamic at play.

> You can't ban a product from being sold in your country on the grounds that manufacturing it in another country is an ecological disaster.

Why not? Constituents like it because it brings back the jobs that left because moving them out allowed companies to avoid environmental regulations, which they can now not avoid either way if they want to sell in your country and so might as well bring the jobs back.

> Constituents like it because it brings back the jobs that left

If it succeeds.

I guess you could do that; a sovereign state can try whatever they like. But has that ever actually happened? I can't think of any case where a country banned import of a product on the grounds that its manufacturing isn't up to environmental standards, even though the manufacturing happens in a different sovereign nation, and is compliant with that other nation's standards. I imagine trying to do that would quickly escalate the issue from business to international politics.

There are already rules about things like labor standards of where the product was made. Like if a company uses slaves to manufacture a product, the purchasing company doesn't just through up their hands and say "What can we do? It is not our labor standards they have to comply with." No reason we couldn't add environmental standards to the list.

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