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Comment by originalvichy | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this is a deflection and a critical reason why progress isn’t happening fast enough. Your house is already messy, and the need to clean it up is now. Not when China and a couple billion other people mess their house up.

My country’s ambitious plans are shot down by members of parliament going for the kneejern ”but India and China...” response, and the net result would be no action if they were in power. Luckily we at least have people some people in the government who are willing to make sacrifices. It’s about time the US as a developed country caught up (not just on the state level).

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If we bring jobs back to the U.S., we will no longer be outsourcing our pollution production. The same jobs will produce less pollution in the U.S. than in China. Of course prices will go up for the goods being produced. So there is something we can do about China and India being major polluters.

Isn’t this something that’s up to the companies that put their production there to decide?

No, because companies that want to employ Americans can't compete with companies that want to employ Chinese, because it costs less to employ Chinese.

In other words there are externalities (polluting the global environment) that aren't priced into the cost of labor when you're comparing the two countries. Tariffs and similar things can help price in that externality.

Tariffs have been good for China. In fact their economy is booming. Polluting your own soil is never a good thing and spills over on other aspects of society makes it more expensive.

Prices are low because we have lots of machines using cheap fossil energy working for us. If we have less machines working for us, we'll produce less goods, and we'll be less rich.

More importantly, if you want China, India and Africa to pollute less, the only way to do so is leading by example and figuring out a way to achieve cost-effective, environmental-friendly path for economic growth for yourself. If it works, and it's better, they'll copy it.

Cleaning up the US would probably mean outsourcing more carbon emissions to the rest of the world. Outsourcing is the primary way the developed world has "cleaned up" so far.

The only way we will substantially reduce CO2 emissions is to develop a source of energy that is carbon-free (or incredibly low carbon) and cheaper and easier to deploy than coal and gas. Reductions without that are politically impossible. There is no other way. If we don't succeed in doing so, we should plan for significant climate change as a certainty and begin planning our adaptive response.

> Cleaning up the US would probably mean outsourcing more carbon emissions to the rest of the world.

That's like saying that cleaning my house means moving the dirt to somebody else's house.

> There is no other way.

That is not true. The other ways are:

1. Reduction of energy use per person.

2. Control of population growth - at the very least, stabilizing the Earth's population and theoretically a reduction.

3. Using Energy sources which are low-carbon, but expensive and/or difficult to deploy.

of course your way makes it a lot _easier_, but since reduction of greenhouse gasses is necessary regardless of the availability of a convenient energy solution, these are also relevant, and gradually are becoming necessary.

By the way - (1.) is already progressing relatively well in lots and lots of countries.

> That's like saying that cleaning my house means moving the dirt to somebody else's house.

No, it's more like moving your cooking and garage wood shop work to someone else's house, taking the results home, and leaving the mess.

The dirtiest parts of the production chain required to sustain our lifestyle have largely been offshored, not only because of cheaper labor but because less developed or more totalitarian countries will tolerate the pollution.

Yes these things can be done cleaner, but that adds cost that people don't seem to be willing to pay.

Americans want all of: (1) high paying good jobs, (2) clean air and water, and (3) cheap manufactured shit. Sorry, but it's worse than a trichotomy. If you pick 3 you have to pass on 1 and 2.

Nuclear, Solar, Wind and Wave energy are all there if we just were willing to do it (too bad about the Green lobby getting stuck up about Nuclear and the Coal/Oil lobby(+nimbyists) sabotaging everything else).

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