Hacker News Reader

Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to come onto HN and dismiss something like this. If the EU agreed to count emissions from China there would be something else to complain about. This is a huge move, and by itself it's not enough, but that doesn't mean it's not worth doing. It's also likely that an agreement like this is a required precondition of enforcing this with trading partners.

The actual implementation of this will likely be a little from column A and a little from column B, and will likely have a positive impact on the current situation.

View on HN

With any policy there is a serious risk of unintended consequences, however.

If this policy does not explicitly include trade, there’s a real risk that European companies will lose in the market as their products are more expensive compared to high pollution imports, or they’ll be forced to move manufacturing to locales where they are permitted to pollute more, both of which are bad for the EU and the world.

The people want green policies. The people vote in the politicians. The politicians tend not to last more than a few years.

The fact that many industries (and associated jobs) will migrate outside the EU by the end of the decade is a tragedy for the EU, bit isn't on the minds of either the politicians or the people right now.

"Will somebody please think about the economy?!"

We will run this planet into the ground until there is nothing left but at least the stock market will be healthy.

The economy is the biggest concern of any country. The actual solution is a economically viable path to green energy, not "let's just migrate everything and ignore the cost", because people (particularly in poorer classes) will revolt otherwise (or elect the other, more fiscally responsible party).

This policy is probably a necessary precondition for including trade. It lets them negotiate from the moral high ground.

From the mora high ground, but economically from a weak position. “We’ve cut our emissions and are importing a lot of your gadgets. You should cut your emissions too, so that we can stop importing your gadgets.”

> economically from a weak position

Why is being an importer a weaker economic position than being the exporter? Honestly, I think the exporter is the weaker position and there's economic research to agree with that.

It's very easy to come up with counterexamples. International companies like Google are far from weak.

If you are a net importer you have to take on loans otherwise you would not be able to purchase imports without any money.

The exporter country can spend the money on purchasing assets in your country. In the case of china the money you spent to buy cheap widgets will be used by the Chinese to buy American assets such as real estate instead of other consumer goods. This would be a good thing if it wasn't for stupid communities that make it hard to build more housing. Instead the existing housing stock gets inflated.

You're making a lot of pretty wrong economic claims and I think there are enough easy distinctions between Google and the market in manufactured goods that I don't need to spend a lot of time responding to that.

> If you are a net importer you have to take on loans otherwise you would not be able to purchase imports without any money.

Not apriori true at all. Imagine I am a country of one. I have $100 million of cash and export absolutely nothing. I buy an equity stake in some companies in some other country (Nigeria) and wooh boy it's fast growing and I'm getting 12% returns. I then spend all of those returns buying goods from China. I'm a net importer and yet haven't taken out a single loan.

Analysis paralysis. Legal frameworks are rarely just conjured up out of a singular document, the exact same way that a finished program is almost never published as a single commit. I say do what you can, when you can, then iterate until it's good.

If that makes things too complicated, well... some of the greatest legal achievements in history stem from compiling existing law into coherent codes based on what worked previously.

Government isn't like designing some dohicky where the perfect is the enemy of the good. If you allow an escape valve for the status quo to continue, it will. It's an adversarial problem.

I've never understood this... Why not just ban dirty imports and offshore manufacturing? Prices will go up, but at least the money is kept in the economy.

Indeed, this is a common position on the Left. Unfortunately, free trade orthodoxy is pretty strong still so even pricing in of externalities is politically verboten.

I imagine it may be hard to audit, and that some people will complain about “protectionism”.

As the majority of what I think I know about international trade comes from reading journalists explaining why the UK is doing Brexit wrong, I don’t actually think I know how big these issues really are — “this molehill is close, those mountains are far away”, to paraphrase Father Ted.

> As the majority of what I think I know about international trade comes from reading journalists explaining why the UK is doing Brexit wrong, I don’t actually think I know how big these issues really are — “this molehill is close, those mountains are far away”, to paraphrase Father Ted.

I tend to assume that the epistemic landscape is biased towards those with the cash to influence it and try to weigh against that when considering an issue. With protectionism, it is a little hard because there are certainly domestic industries that benefit from protection.

That's a good reasoning.

Now imagine how much money and influence China has and how it can affect our corrupted politicians.

China is not a person nor really a cohesive entity. Wealthy people in both China and the United States have much to gain from int'l trade unencumbered from restrictions related to worker's rights or environmental damage.

That would be very difficult to accomplish within existing WTO rules.

Prices going up is not very popular.

This is why I always buy $10K+ Rolex watches instead of $20 made in China Casios. Worth it.

Added to which, China can be dealt with via restructuring a trade agreement provided there is the political will. Which it looks like there is.

The fact that this plugs one hole in the sinking ship and not two is hardly evidence that it's crap.

> The fact that this plugs one hole in the sinking ship and not two is hardly evidence that it's crap.

This is a much more eloquent explanation, and I am saving this for the future. This is exactly what I meant.

> Added to which, China can be dealt with via restructuring a trade agreement provided there is the political will. Which it looks like there is.

Except EU is already too weak to force China to do anything, and by moving carbon-intensive production outside Europe they would be giving China even more leverage...

China is highly dependent on the EU and the US for trade. The EU is the biggest trading bloc in the world. The EU has a lot of leverage.

The problem is that China trivially buys off a single member state to nix things like this from happening, as the EU must agree unanimously on these matters.

> The EU is the biggest trading bloc in the world.

That recently changed: https://www.dw.com/en/asia-pacific-nations-sign-worlds-bigge...

> China is highly dependent on the EU and the US for trade

This is double-edged sword - EU and US are dependent on the imported goods. if the trade between China and the rest of the world stopped China would end up with abundance, and EU would be in serious trouble, not being able to buy basic things they need. Always better to have some real stuff than virtual money.

> > The EU is the biggest trading bloc in the world. > That recently changed:

Both of those are by population and not by GDP.

GDP measures buying/negotiating power. ASEAN is _tiny_.

The US is still top of the heap.

You must be thinking about AESAN countries alone, which have about $3 trillion GDP, but this free trade agreement also includes China ($13.6T), Japan ($5T) and Australia ($1.4T), placing it ahead of both USA ($20T) and EU ($15.6T)

That was my point - that China can just focus on trading with other Asian countries and be well. Especially if they someday manage to add India ($2.7T) to the mix.

The EU can at the very least stop purchasing or slap tariffs on pollution heavy items.

"It's easy to come onto HN and dismiss something like this."

So easy that it happens every single time, like clockwork. There seems to be a cross section of people who eagerly confuse blanket cynicism with thoughtful analysis.

To be fair the ‘let’s just import everything from China’ column has been getting the majority of entries in recent decades.

If done wrong, the regulation just becomes a forced offshoring and willful destruction of national industry.

Too say this is a prerequisite to bring negotiations to the table so that partners like China will have something to match, well to that I say, just look at how good that did in the USA or Australia.

I find the criticism of this policy to be poignant.

Is it a huge move in the same way the Paris agreement was?

Because it turns out that not one single country managed to hit the targets that were set.

First, could that be because the accord was signed in 2015 and its emissions targets are in 2030?

Second, countries set their own emissions targets. So it's more of a gentleman's agreement.

Third, it's also false. At least 50 cities are on track [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/11/paris-cl...]. In fact people track who is naughty and nice and there are some countries making good progress and still on track [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/09/clima...].

India is hitting their targets.

Is it really a "huge move" though? I feel like we've seen something like that once or twice a year for the past decade at least.

I supposed what's different from previous announcements is now that we're to see somewhat more tangible deadlines, not "30 years in the future" which will likely never happen. It would be nice to plan for an even shorter amount of time, 5 years for instance, so that people announcing these goals are actually accountable if they're not reached, but it's a nice start.

Global polices take time to bubble up. Say you get a local authority to agree to something (news), then multiple ones (news), then the entire state (news), then multiple states (news), then a continent-sized entity (news), then multiple continent-sized entities (news), then all entities (news).

That's a lot of announcements for what could be, in practice, a single policy. When the problems are as many and as interlocked as this particular one is (involving emissions, energy sources, level-playing market issues, etc), you will have a multitude of agrements and initiatives, which will feel "multiplied" through news channels.

> It's easy to come onto HN and dismiss something like this.

It's easy because the EU and european countries have a history of virtue signaling.

Like how they are so great at recycling by sending their garbage to china.

https://www.thejournal.ie/ireland-plastic-waste-3786393-Jan2...

Norway is such an amazing "green" country.

https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Energy/Oil/P...

Pretty much everything from environment to human rights, the EU and europe are the most destructive and yet pretend to be the best.

If the EU cuts emissions by 55%, it just means that they are going to ship their emissions to china, ASEAN, india and eventually africa in the next 80 years. That's it. I highly doubt they are planning on lowering their standard of living by 55%.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com