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Comment by ppf | Hacker News Reader

>What is this "free pass" of which you speak?

We gladly buy almost everything from China (lithium batteries, electronics, wind turbines, solar panels, all of which take a tremendous amount of energy to manufacture), without ever asking if they were made in a "CO2 neutral" way.

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Oops, sorry I forgot that there's no such thing as life-cycle assessment, amortised cost analysis, payback periods or any of the similar analyses performed every day by engineers, purchasers, operators, accountants, companies and governments. I guess they haven't been invented yet. Sounds like you've found a gap in the market; why not pitch it to YC?

Oddly enough, I don't see a "carbon-neutral" lifecycle assesment done for all the solar panels on the market. Or on an EV, discounting the ridiculous "carbon exchange" system.

It's really not free... there is a tremendous cost to their population's health and their environment (air, water). It's shocking and tragic to see but their hospitals are full of children dealing with respiratory problems from pollution.

If China did nothing but produce those things then we should praise China because all its CO2 emissions exist for the sake of reducing CO2 emissions.

The real problem is that they also produce everything else.

Sure, except that rulings like the one in this article hinder western countries from being able to do the same (that is, manufacture their own solar panels and other energy-intensive "renewable" products).

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