Free trade raises the standard for everyone. Today China has those issues, but free trade is raising their living standard. As standards of living raise people find pollution is negatively affecting them and so they solve the problem locally.

Of course the downside free trade allows production to move to places where there are no controls because non-local pollution both less affects any individual, and because international politics come into play trying to solve it, and those who have a bad standard of living see this as the rich trying to keep them down by not letting them compete.

The last might sound negative about free trade ever solving pollution, but it actually isn't. China and India are both reaching the tipping point where enough people are rich enough to care about pollution that they are doing something about it. Half the world population is already rich enough to care, and that half also wants more stuff so there isn't enough poor places left for this cycle of moving production to repeat for many more cycles. Also, every time production moves they bring the latest technology - China never had the cities full of coal smoke stacks spewing black smoke into the air like the US and Europe had 120 years ago. (they are big into coal, but their coal has always been cleaner just because some cleaner coal technology is also cheaper in the long run)

> As standards of living raise people find pollution is negatively affecting them and so they solve the problem locally.

This works if the problem is local and bothersome to the locals -- rusting drums leaking poison or heaps of trash. Carbon dioxide and methane are invisible and odorless and instantly become everyone's problem, so we can't expect this mechanism to induce people to solve the problem locally.

You are yourself the counter example that proves you are wrong. People like you do in fact care about non-local pollution. there are steps: first you need to get far enough out of poverty that you can start thinking you can accept the lower standard of living not having poison around you is acceptable. When you don't have enough to eat or in danger of freezing to death (or other weather/nature related disasters) that poison is something you just stay away from - particularity if your job is with whoever is dumping it since making them clean up might me they don't pay you and then you can't eat. When you don't have those basic worries to you worry about more avoidable ones like local poison/pollution. Only after the above do non-local concerns matter.

It's all about perspective. Even the poor in developed nations have a much higher standard of living than the poor in developing nations. Most people only compare their situation with the situation of others in the same country/culture. So it's tough for most people to objectively say that they are doing well and would rather spend their limited money for a more expensive version of the same item. You also have human nature, where most people live nearly at their means, or even beyond them, rather than within them.

I guess I'm basically saying there tends to exist a lot of scope creep in each individual's definition of when local and basic concern have been met.

You are right that it basically just moves the pollution to the next developing country.

You are incorrect about your coal comment. You can see China spewing yellow smoke (it's an even dirtier type of coal than the two we have here). The cleaner tech only gets adopted if it's financially cheaper or has some other incentive like the government enforcing standard (which relies on the education/opinion of the people).

You didn't understand my coal comment. No surprise, it is hard to explain. Efficiency gains mean you burn less coal. The old boilers in 1900 were very inefficient. It is not very hard to build a modern boiler that is much more efficient, and thus uses less fuel. The coal might worse, but China is using far less to get the same energy out of it which means less pollution.

I can see that on a per Kw basis. You would also have to factor in what the electricity production is today vs in 1900 to make an accurate comparison. Total pollution output today may still be higher. For example, you might have quadrupled the efficiency but the demand may have increased ten times or more. So sure, they adopted a newer technology than 120 years ago and is cleaner, but it's also not the latest technology nor is it even close to the cleanest. Many of their plants are currently very dirty. They do have plans to upgrade in the future. Not to mention, it's not the cleanest option out there, even at the higher efficiency. For example, natural gas is cleaner and that tech has been around for a while. Even a lot of nuclear tech is about 60 years old.

"China never had the cities full of coal smoke stacks spewing black smoke into the air like the US and Europe had 120 years ago."

Please do a search for air quality alerts and deaths in china as well as for pictures of the smog. It is every bit as bad or even worse. The tech may ne more efficient but the scale and overall output has similar effects. Yes the smoke is a yellow color and not black, that is mostly due to the soft brown coal they use in some parts of the country rather than the anthracite or even bituminous coal we used.