I can vote for all the environmental protections that I want, but what good does that do if it just forces companies to manufacture goods in places that have worse environmental protections than we do?

I ask this as someone who believes in both movements, and don't have a great answer to resolve this internal conflict.

As China becomes richer they will go threw the same stuff that Britain and later the US did.

Maybe I don't fit the bill as 'envoirmentalist' but I like to live in a place and country with a clean envoirment.

China will have to fix its own problems, and Im sure they eventually will.

Unemployment in the US.

Globalism sounds great.

People keep trying to either spin globalism as evil or good, but it's neither. It's just something that was going to happen no matter what. The US does not have a say in whether it happens. If the US doesn't figure out a way to make it work for them, then they'll be replaced by whichever country does.

The answer is not passing laws for tariffs or thinking the US can race to the bottom with low wages and manufacturing. The world desperately needs advanced technology and medicine, and the US should be focused on that, not stupidly trying to compete with literally every other single country on Earth on things any country can produce.

You are also misunderstanding by conflating globalism with free trade. The two are related, but not the same. You can be for free trade of goods and services, but not for unelected central powers (i.e. an EU, a central bank).

Mainstream academic economists are typically free trade, but we have no science to test this theory so just br careful about drinking too much of the kool aid. LarGe corps, banks, and US gov generally want globalism. Keep in mind why they want that (profit and power). We still have a lot of people suffering in 2017 and no longer a good excuse for it (i.e. resources scarcity cant explain malnutrition anymore).

The ECB is nominated by the EC.

The U.S. Federal Reserve commissioners and chairman are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

Hell, by your logic, the U.S. Senate before the 20th Century wasn't elected because they were elected by state legislatures instead of popular elections.

It's worked pretty well here for doctors and pharma.

[1] http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/poverty-and-shared-p...

There are different levels of scale at play that make very different tactics work in Shanghai vs Vancouver; in the former there's enough difficulty ensuring that all the logistics work to ensure the populace is not starving that other considerations will necessarily have to go by the wayside.

We also have to consider history and cultural forces, which have inertia, whenever we consider social change over time. The western world is becoming cleaner largely by virtue of each succeeding generation encouraging its children to take stewardship of the environment seriously. Even with this tendency, we still pollute terribly.

I'm not convinced that there is much of an environmental shift in Mainland Chinese culture presently, at the very least in the city cores; and if there is, I suspect it will be generations before it's taken as seriously as it is here, which is still insufficient to actually stop bad things - and still undereducated as to what risks are reasonable vs. simply protesting whatever has the right virtue-signalling associations in the current year.

When you say:

> As China becomes richer

...there's an implicit assumption that "becoming richer" is just a natural, unavoidable, guaranteed outcome of the modern world. This is another assumption, and one I fear would be even harder to justify than Chinese culture becoming environmentally focused in a short enough time to matter.

There's no guarantee that resource extraction at the current rate needed for wealth to outgrow population growth is a guarantee. This means there's no reason to assume that the per-capita average GDP or standard of living is going to rise forever, to the point where environmentalism (in the sense that it's often more expensive) is going to become not only feasible, but fashionable. Frugality may overcome the natural human desire to display wealthiness, if the threshold is too high for the average person.

Lastly -

While your solution may very well become the case in the long term, and again, I hope you're right because it's truly the best outcome, we still have to deal with environmental ramifications today, both of past decisions and of decision being made right now. It's probably better to stem the tide earlier rather than waiting for it to just naturally stem itself.

This might mean "environmental protectionism", in the form of heavy tariffs against goods from countries with lower environmental standards and/or poor enforcement.

Their governments are going to work to improve their standards of living one way or another. If they do it with our cooperation, with our more efficient technology, and with our more efficient production practices they will be able to grow in a way that is less environmentally damaging than the Industrial revolution was.

Enriching them and giving them access to education and giving women reproductive choice is also the only way we are going to foster the necessary reduction in birth-rates we will need to live on Earth sustainably.

Much like how London dealt with 'Killer Fogs' hundreds of years ago when not enough wind was clearing the air; China can't completely ignore the environment because the costs are simply getting to high. However, it's going to be a long time before they embrace western style pollution controls, because there is a big gap between killing people today and killing them in 40 years.

http://fortune.com/2017/01/10/china-red-alert-pollution-pm2-...

Anyone who thinks the environment is even remotely a reason for China's success in manufacturing is frankly ignorant.

Perhaps I could give them more credit for real progress, but the root cause is still a disconnect from what's on the books being a long way from what's enforced.

Their smog problems largely relate to cars that would not pass US annual emissions standards from 20 years ago. Similarly coal is never 'clean' but it's not that expensive to dramatically reduce particulate emissions.

And yes, cheap labor etc plays a huge role in some types of manufacturing. But, by subsidizing the inputs and lax enforcement of regulations you see dramatic shifts in many types of production well past their less harmful competitive advantages.

But that's for later society (ones with people with stable livelihoods) to figure out, not currently on the table. If you allow yourself to be paralyzed by one issue tapping into the next, you'll deadlock yourself. One issue at a time. The environment is the least of the american worker's immediate concerns anyways, you might as well save your breath in that context.

(Yes, the environment is fucked, "sooner the better" etc - but that's idealism, not pragmatism, and guess which by which one the world actually turns. Bringing up noise just impairs yourself to communicating with the public.)

I don't get this mentality at all. The more we put off curbing environmental change, the more expensive it becomes to fix.

I feel like it's analogous to credit card debt – what you're saying is, don't worry about that mountain of credit debt, with it's 14% interest rate; pay the minimum and contribute to a mutual fund instead. But the credit interest overruns the fund interest, so you lose money. Similarly, I think the costs of climate change are going to overrun any other economic issue we decide to focus on.

They have a number of initiatives related to the environment [1]. They are trying to reduce their carbon footprint, and are close to get 100% of their power from renewable sources. They also announced their intention of a closed-loop supply chain (no new mining).

Of course, they are not perfect. The Washington Post documented the horrifying exploitation of cobalt miners in Congo [2]. Some of that cobalt ended up in Apple batteries. Apple said it was addressing the issue [3].

The biggest contribution you yourself can make at this moment is to simply consume less.

[1] https://images.apple.com/lae/environment/pdf/Apple_Environme...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/c...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/03...

Why not? It works for so many other countries. Is it not a fundamental characteristic of government to prioritize its citizens over others? Without that, we've got a de facto world government with dissolved borders but that only benefits the rich and powerful. If we truly want to give equal rights and privileges to everyone on Earth we should make global governance explicit to make sure the poor and disenfranchised get fair representation.

If we were to enact a tariff on foreign-made smartphones that was so high that they couldn't compete with domestically-made smartphones, the smartphone manufacturers in China and the rest of the far east would just sell their phones across the rest of the world, where they would out-compete our phones on price (initially). Our domestic manufacturers would have a smaller market and less access to materials and technical advancements, causing our phones to become inferior in quality as well as overpriced. And that would eventually hurt our people and our entire economy as well, because we won't be able to enjoy the technological advancements and lower-cost goods that the rest of the world is benefiting from.

The Soviet Union used to have a pretty self-contained, very protectionist economy, and the low-quality of their goods was a standing joke in the US for decades. That's what protectionism gets you if you're not the sole manufacturer or sole market for a product.

Manufacture IPhones in China to sell to the rest of the world.

I bet that whats Apple is going to do.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/02/17/515850029/episo...

Even with the tariff incentives, the demand within the country wasn't enough to cover the economies of scale to keep manufacturing costs effective.

It even worked for the United States. Protectionism was a major component of our policy approach toward industrialization.

Protectionism as a mechanism for supporting the development of domestic capabilities is, historically, a well-justified policy position.

And if you look to highly protectionist economies today, you'll find mostly developing economies.

> Why not?

1. Most importantly, protectionism as a mechanism for inflating wages and/or spurring job growth in an already developed economy isn't nearly as well-tested an approach as examples of protectionism in America's past. Historic examples of US protectionism had the end goal of boosting domestic labor productivity. Modern protectionism risks doing exactly the opposite.

2. The diffuse benefits of free trade must be weighed against the more localized costs of free trade. It's a difficult calculus, but it shouldn't be ignored. Cheap stuff at Walmart and Amazon benefits a whole ton of people. Perhaps more importantly, access to foreign markets and capital creates a lot of jobs and wealth domstically. A lot of Americans are employed doing high-paying, high-quality work that is exported globally. (Including a lot of software engineers.)

3. The benefits to labor may be short lived if automation wipes out a lot of manufacturing jobs. In which case we've traded access to foreign markets and capital for maybe 10 years of jobs and a false sense of non-urgency in job re-training.

I don't see any reason todays America would be any different.

So you take less (percentage-wise) from the mega rich than you do from the middle class because large capital doesn't spend a large percent of its capital on consumer goods. That's regressive.

Why don't you go take the money from the rich instead of coming after the middle class? You want the guy who's making $50k a year to pay $200 more for his iPhone and you want the guy making a million a year to do the same. Both of them are only going to own the one iPhone. Straight up regressive.

Your big export industries will be hit, especially those that run at huge economies of scale and are able to dump the produce on other countries devastating their local industry (think big corp farms).

The answer is never as simple as it seems

If you have the means, invest with the wealth makers. I'd buy into SPY or FANG and let these CEOs do the work for me while I relocate to a low CoL location.

Does it scale? Probably not. I honestly can't think of any other way to make ends meet one my skills become moot.

My only truly innate talent is my ability to cogently communicate with my local peers better than someone who lives elsewhere. Even that is becoming irrelevant because global companies are homogenizing business communication styles.

How do you figure that 30+ years of outsourcing has not yet proven your point?

Fairness. If some major corporation can go somewhere where they pay people $.80 a day for their labor, let me hire people for that amount to do what ever I want. Or we enforce our current laws onto the entire supply chain. Every single person whose labor went to making some product had to be treated a certain legal bare minimum standard.

At least with automation it does largely become available to more people (granted we have to ensure the legal system isn't used to shut it down, such as with the DMCA or the patent system).

anything that is completely unregulated or loosely regulated is prone to abuse. tariffs/additional taxation levels the playing field. also - reciprocity. try importing a US-made vehicle in Japan for example...

http://www.npr.org/2017/02/23/516895101/when-argentina-elect...

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/02/17/515850029/episo...

Something like all manufacturers would be required to be certified and routinely inspected by 3rd party companies that have been approved by the government to do said certifying and inspecting. Would need to have unscheduled inspections and heavy fines against the involved companies to work but we could do it if we wanted.

That's literally what China does, and it seems to be working for them. YMMV.