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Comment by hnbad | Hacker News Reader

Corporations move operations to places where operating is cheap? How exactly would this not happen if the prices were lower? This kind of concessions is how you end up with domestic sweat shops.

FWIW the answer is not to prevent corporations from leaving the country either. That's silly. The answer is to apply carbon emission regulations to the entire supply chain of a company and to make the fines/fees more expensive than the money a business can save from moving somewhere else. Businesses act on what makes financial sense. If you want to change how businesses act, you need to change what makes financial sense for them.

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You can try to ignore that and insist on applying emission regulations on import, which is what the EU currently is preparing.

However, the scenario this will lead to is: Industry will still leave high-energy-price areas. If low-energy-price regions can be found within the EU, industry might go there. Otherwise industry will be off to wherever in the world is cheap and happily charge the EU carbon import duties to EU customers. The rest of the world will enjoy low-priced not-carbon-neutral products that the EU will never be able to compete with because of economies of scale.

The only viable ways out of this isn't import duties but import restrictions, i.e. outright preventing goods that are not up to EU CO_2 standards from being imported. That will lead to local CO_2-neutral industries that have to be continuously walled off, because if they are exposed to the rest of the world they will be too small and expensive. The other way is a global agreement on CO_2 standards, such that those kinds of import regulations are unnecessary.

... which ends the same way as taxation treaties. Foreign countries will happily introduce CO2 emission regulations, then lie about them on a large scale.

See for example China: who have signed plenty of environmental treaties yet are dumping nuclear waste in the oceans on a large scale. Hell, China isn't even protecting their own people or nature just to avoid transporting the waste to the ocean. Rivers can do that for free, you see. To fully demonstrate how governments work, they lie about doing this (despite the fact it can be very easily measured), and secondly they criticize other countries for doing much less (such as China now criticizing Japan being forced into dumping some Fukushima cooling water)

The other alternative is what most tax havens are doing. They are raising taxes on companies ... and handing out subsidies that, somewhat suspiciously, exactly balance the tax raise. This is even done within Europe. This principle can easily be applied to emission regulations. After all, it's always paying to be allowed to pollute. Governments can simply pay that back some other way.

> If low-energy-price regions can be found within the EU, industry might go there.

Which can be a blessing or a curse depending on how you look at it.

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