The answer is not very hard. People like to attribute everything to regulation but the reality is that most parts of living standards improve when incomes grows.

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.

Polution and slave labour in China.

Unemployment in the US.

Globalism sounds great.

Globalism is, and will continue to, happen no matter what the US does. The US needs to figure out how to make it work for the long term. Protectionism won't work. You might as well be a cooper or haberdasher trying to pass laws to keep people using barrels and hats.

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.

Protectionism has proven to work well in some cases in history.

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 EU is unelected? Member countries send their own representatives to the EU Parliament; they send council members to the European Council.

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.

Many would consider that unelected. I'm sure you draw the line somewhere too: I doubt you consider every government employee elected just because you can draw a chain of responsibility back to some elected official.

Please don't backpedal by going into the definition of the word. The rhetorical value of "unelected" was to paint the EU and Federal Reserve as unrepresentative.

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.

You are simply and flatly factually wrong about this, sorry. I encourage you to check out the textbook definition of the Fed as well as technocracy. You can also Google 'differences b/w a technocracy and democracy.' The Fed is widely accepted by every piece of academic literature Ive ever come across to be a technocracy, and that is the word we use to describe it. Also, the EU can and should be thought of at least being largely technocratic as well.

You're the only person in this thread to talk about "democracy vs technocracy," debating a point I never made.

When you were arguing about how the EU and Fed are, in your opinion, elected, I thought you would be able to make the connection. They aren't considered elected officials in the standard sense we think about it--in a democratic sense--and no one thinks that. They are unelected by any plain interpretation of democracy. That's the reason the word technocracy is used to describe them.

> Protectionism has proven to work well in some cases in history.

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

Globalism != Globalisation

You're grossly simplifying. According to the World Bank [1], since 1990, nearly 1.1 billion people have escaped extreme poverty.

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

I hope that you're right, but it's definitely a big assumption on your part that China (and, of course, Chinese culture in general) will naturally head down the path of caring about the environment in the same sense that Western countries and cultures have started to.

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.

What? As if west is taking environmental protectionism seriously. Look what Trump is doing and other climate change deniers. An idiot in Australian parliament walks around with a lump of coal. Canada is raping the country digging up those tar sands which is more polluting than previously thought according to last studies. China needs to catch up at any cost, but once they do their government system will allow them to take drastic measures to clean up faster than the west. Our political systems are in bed with polluters and we're still emmitting the highest levels of CO2 per capita.

Poor, starving, and desperate people don't have the luxury to worry about environmental protections.

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.

Pollution related annual deaths in China have gotten bad enough the government does not have much of a choice.

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.

China hasn't been ignoring the environment though and have had Western style pollution controls for years. Unfortunately it's a complicated issue:

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.

The worst days are always going to be weather related everywhere, but clam days are really just magnifying the average impact not some weather pattern unique to china.

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.

Stop trying to handle env at the domestic level; measures only work at an international level (UN regulations or tariffs/sanctions or whatever).

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.)

> "sooner the better" etc - but that's idealism, not pragmatism

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.

In Apple's case it is mostly a labor play.

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...