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Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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).

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