Re:Britain poised for third phase of industrial revolution
by pjscott on Saturday November 06, 2010 @02:10PM
(#1877398)
If Britain can drive costs down by automating factories, then I'm sure China can, too. They have a lot of skilled people, they've proven their willingness to invest big money on manufacturing, and unlike Britain, China actually has a credible plan to deliver cheap electricity over the next two or three decades. Oh, and they have cheap labor to fill in the gaps where you still need people, which is another plus.
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Re:Britain poised for third phase of industrial revolution
by Nick_C on Sunday November 07, 2010 @03:02AM
(#1878986)
I get what you're saying about energy costs, but I'm not as convinced. We (first-world) got a lot of cheap manufacturing inputs because we ignored (i.e. passed on to next generations) some of the costs of energy, namely pollution and water use in coal. One of the reasons we were able to do that in the 50s and 60s is that we hadn't really convinced ourselves it would be as bad as the environmentalists said, so we ignored it.
China won't be able to pass those externalities on to future generations as we did. The reason is that we serve as an example of what happens when you do ignore the full cost of energy generation, and there is already significant local concern about pollution from unrestricted manufacturing and energy generation.
I think China will not have the luxury that we had of several decades of ignoring some hidden input costs. They will be forced to implement full environmental impact controls which will drive up energy costs.
They do have some dam projects for hydropower generation left to bring online, but I can't see any really major projects being implemented after that. Then there's nuclear, about which I don't know.