That is incredibly short sighted.

The reason why you don’t see that much pollution in your country is that it has been outsourced to other countries with more lax pollution laws and less worker protection laws. This means that fabrication of an item produces more pollution than if it was built in your country (where there’s more regulation). And then there’s even more pollution due to the long transportation haul.

But you get a cheaper price tag. And your rivers are clean.

But think about these things when putting blame.

Where do you think all the products manufactured in China are going?

The west is taking advantage of cheap labor in China and pushing all the externalities there. You're using a computer or smartphone that was presumably largely made in China to post this message.

To then turn around and say that climate change is entirely China's fault is absurd. You have to look at what countries are actually consuming the products leading to the emissions.

You're also conflating localized pollution with co2 emissions.

Did the demand for products from polluting industry disappear in the developed world or did the factories just move overseas? Shifting blame to "underdeveloped and corrupt nations" does nothing to address the fact that developed countries still demand goods from polluting industry and do little to promote more sustainable forms of economic development.

my take is that western and developed nations are just exporting all their problems to developing/manufacturing countries. it's not like europeans don't consume products that cause pollution, they just export the processes that create that pollution to other countries. if anything, europeans/americans are responsible for the majority of the pollution in china/india as a vast percentage of the goods produced end up being consumed in the western/developed nations anyway. i think europeans should feel guilty when they see the disparity in pollution- norwegian streams and beaches may be clean but they can only do that because they import their goods from factories in other countries and send their oil to be burned elsewhere.

In 2021 China and the Europe have the following Wind Power Capacities (MW):

China: 328,480 Europe: 235,712

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_European_Uni...

China also produces the majority of Solar PV Panels - https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/solar-pv-manu...

This has to be a troll post.

> Wondering what are countries such as china and india doing to maintain a cleaner planet if anything at all

They did SO gigantic a reforestation that it is visible from space.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144540/china-and-in...

> We keep blaming ourselves while underdeveloped and corrupt nations pollute virtually everything in the their management.

That literally sounds like supremacist, 'we are civilized' nonsense.

Those countries are literally the world's factories. Majority of the emissions of those countries belong to Western corporations. Except they are recorded as those countries emissions.

And the West arrogantly tries to sell them 'carbon credits' - another financial scam - have another country manufacture your products in sweatshops and have little emissions. Then make them buy 'carbon credits' from you.

We literally pay them to do it. Where do you think things come from? We command all that with our money.

That's kind of the point of the article: it's all capitalism. (Despite the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, it's run under "capitalism with Chinese characteristics".)

Capitalism is the reason we have climate change: the environment is an externality that isn't priced in, and so it's treated as zero cost. Anybody who tries to incorporate that cost single-handledly will be at an economic disadvantage to somebody who doesn't, and capitalism will destroy the former and reward the latter.

That doesn't prescribe the solution, which is going to be a complex balance of millions of factors (both current and historical). Large, poor countries will have to play their parts, too.

But the lesson here is to identify what got us into this situation so that we can hope to find a way out. The free market caused it, and maybe it can be part of the solution -- but not unless there is also a non-free-market portion in which we all agree to stop treating the atmosphere as an infinite carbon sink.

It's only at that point that the real search for solutions can begin. But it's never going to happen while one country -- one of the largest carbon emitters both per-capita and collectively -- is unable to act because of enormous political influence from people who insist that it's a hoax.