The actual implementation of this will likely be a little from column A and a little from column B, and will likely have a positive impact on the current situation.
If this policy does not explicitly include trade, there’s a real risk that European companies will lose in the market as their products are more expensive compared to high pollution imports, or they’ll be forced to move manufacturing to locales where they are permitted to pollute more, both of which are bad for the EU and the world.
If that makes things too complicated, well... some of the greatest legal achievements in history stem from compiling existing law into coherent codes based on what worked previously.
Why is being an importer a weaker economic position than being the exporter? Honestly, I think the exporter is the weaker position and there's economic research to agree with that.
If you are a net importer you have to take on loans otherwise you would not be able to purchase imports without any money.
The exporter country can spend the money on purchasing assets in your country. In the case of china the money you spent to buy cheap widgets will be used by the Chinese to buy American assets such as real estate instead of other consumer goods. This would be a good thing if it wasn't for stupid communities that make it hard to build more housing. Instead the existing housing stock gets inflated.
> If you are a net importer you have to take on loans otherwise you would not be able to purchase imports without any money.
Not apriori true at all. Imagine I am a country of one. I have $100 million of cash and export absolutely nothing. I buy an equity stake in some companies in some other country (Nigeria) and wooh boy it's fast growing and I'm getting 12% returns. I then spend all of those returns buying goods from China. I'm a net importer and yet haven't taken out a single loan.
As the majority of what I think I know about international trade comes from reading journalists explaining why the UK is doing Brexit wrong, I don’t actually think I know how big these issues really are — “this molehill is close, those mountains are far away”, to paraphrase Father Ted.
I tend to assume that the epistemic landscape is biased towards those with the cash to influence it and try to weigh against that when considering an issue. With protectionism, it is a little hard because there are certainly domestic industries that benefit from protection.
Now imagine how much money and influence China has and how it can affect our corrupted politicians.
The fact that many industries (and associated jobs) will migrate outside the EU by the end of the decade is a tragedy for the EU, bit isn't on the minds of either the politicians or the people right now.
We will run this planet into the ground until there is nothing left but at least the stock market will be healthy.
The fact that this plugs one hole in the sinking ship and not two is hardly evidence that it's crap.
This is a much more eloquent explanation, and I am saving this for the future. This is exactly what I meant.
Except EU is already too weak to force China to do anything, and by moving carbon-intensive production outside Europe they would be giving China even more leverage...
The problem is that China trivially buys off a single member state to nix things like this from happening, as the EU must agree unanimously on these matters.
That recently changed: https://www.dw.com/en/asia-pacific-nations-sign-worlds-bigge...
> China is highly dependent on the EU and the US for trade
This is double-edged sword - EU and US are dependent on the imported goods. if the trade between China and the rest of the world stopped China would end up with abundance, and EU would be in serious trouble, not being able to buy basic things they need. Always better to have some real stuff than virtual money.
Both of those are by population and not by GDP.
GDP measures buying/negotiating power. ASEAN is _tiny_.
The US is still top of the heap.
That was my point - that China can just focus on trading with other Asian countries and be well. Especially if they someday manage to add India ($2.7T) to the mix.
So easy that it happens every single time, like clockwork. There seems to be a cross section of people who eagerly confuse blanket cynicism with thoughtful analysis.
If done wrong, the regulation just becomes a forced offshoring and willful destruction of national industry.
Because it turns out that not one single country managed to hit the targets that were set.
Second, countries set their own emissions targets. So it's more of a gentleman's agreement.
Third, it's also false. At least 50 cities are on track [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/11/paris-cl...]. In fact people track who is naughty and nice and there are some countries making good progress and still on track [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/09/clima...].
That's a lot of announcements for what could be, in practice, a single policy. When the problems are as many and as interlocked as this particular one is (involving emissions, energy sources, level-playing market issues, etc), you will have a multitude of agrements and initiatives, which will feel "multiplied" through news channels.
It's easy because the EU and european countries have a history of virtue signaling.
Like how they are so great at recycling by sending their garbage to china.
https://www.thejournal.ie/ireland-plastic-waste-3786393-Jan2...
Norway is such an amazing "green" country.
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Energy/Oil/P...
Pretty much everything from environment to human rights, the EU and europe are the most destructive and yet pretend to be the best.
If the EU cuts emissions by 55%, it just means that they are going to ship their emissions to china, ASEAN, india and eventually africa in the next 80 years. That's it. I highly doubt they are planning on lowering their standard of living by 55%.
- https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...
- https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-carbon-bord...
IMHO it's unfortunate when the kneejerk reaction to "governments / leaders do thing X" is "but did they think about obvious edge case Y!?"
Yes, they thought about obvious edge case Y; they employ / engage with loads of policy and domain experts for whom thinking about obvious edge case Y is table stakes, especially if Y is something one can think up off the cuff in a comment on HN. Perhaps not all of that thinking makes its way into final policies, whether for practical or political reasons. Perhaps much of that thinking - especially where nuance, expertise, or uncertainty are concerned - gets dropped from layperson reporting on the policy. Almost always, you can find publicly-available documents, transcripts, etc. that exhaustively list these details - all the arguments, all the community consultations, all the policy whitepapers.
These all exist, and unlike in modern academic publishing, you can almost always find and read them for free! That said, I do agree that we as a society need to put much more effort into accurate communication around expert fields. Specialization, and the resulting glut of information written for and consumed by specialized audiences, is one of many forces that make it harder to build a shared, agreed-upon sense of reality. What might it look like to solve this problem in the 21st century?
It's good that they're finally working on it. But it's also something that should have happened a very long time ago.
If you don't bother and the other side does: guess whose suggestions end up in the law. Democracy is not a spectator sport. If you don't show up it has consequences.
The people you see on camera and in the news are a tiny, tiny slice of the operation of government. It is a grave misunderstanding of how society functions to equate "politicians" with "the government". This is true of any large system: a company is not its CEO, a non-profit is not its executive director, a program is not the interface it exposes to the outside world, and so on. In dealing with large systems, equating the part with the whole like this is effectively throwing away 99% of your power to understand and change those systems.
When a policy works, it's what is expected so it's not notable.
It looked like some of the dirtier industries are being moved on from China to SE Asia (Vietnam etc.) but there's a general push across the world to transition to clean energy.
I'm pretty confident we'll get out of the doom and gloom existential threat to humanity scenarios, but still think large portions of the world's populations will be impacted by climate change.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/27/china-ca....
Possibly my biggest worry is water - providing water for 1bn+ people (and agriculture, and industries) is going to get harder and harder. I'm a techno optimist, so I'm hoping some variant of desalination tech will pull through if things get really bad.
The other big worry as you say is the heat waves. If we do get emissions under control, I think we'll also end up doing some form of carbon scrubbing and don't just sit around in a 2C warmer world. None of our current climate engineering approaches are enough to arrest global warming by themselves but I'm hoping we can eventually control the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
No, they did not. Germany did and China profitted.
(although they have also brought online a shittonne of coal power, too)
China was the second mover profitting from proven technology and prices that were lowered for all players by subsidising not German companies, but the installation of solar power (no matter where it was from).
And you wouldn't have any way of verifying whether it's true and demonstrating it's false.
To me, it says they finally see that the consequences of not acting to mitigate climate change are unacceptable, and that there's no solution without risk left.
1) we recognize the positive impacts that industrialization brings, directly and indirectly. Directly raising GDP has an indirect, positive net effect on quality of life (not spiritually or philosophically, though, I might argue; although, I only think of these things because I live in an industrialized, developed, “rich” nation).
2) we recognize the horrible impact that industrialization has on our world.
The industrialized nations are the ones leading the charge in saying, “hey, wait a minute, industrialization is bad! It’s wrecking our world and we will die a horrible death as a species if we continue at this rate so slow down!” But those nations who are just hitting their stride, so to speak, aren’t gonna stop. That’s totally unfair. They think, “what the fuck am I supposed to do? Just sit here and play with sticks? I want the money, I want the goods, I want to be a rich, developed nation.” And so they keep burning, and will keep burning, unless (IMO) the already rich and developed nations somehow help them to develop in the cleanest way possible.
I don't think you can solve these by fiat.
Governments can only realistically focus on improving the liberty and prosperity of their citizens (you know "life, liberty...).
Happiness is very subjective and I'd say in many cases comes from inside. You could be the richest, most famous and powerful person in the world and still be unhappy.
If they manage to lift those hundreds of millions of people out of poverty AND "just" keep their emissions constant, I consider that as a win for humanity.
Everyone else, especially in developed countries, needs to bring their per capita emissions radically down.
Is it though? How do we people of the Earth now win if it is 2100 and there is 2x more of us and the emissions are the same?
Depending on how you measure the CO2 emissions you could argue that not China is the first one that should take action but the ones that did most of the damage.
So instead of explicitly working in the cost of carbon and decreasing spending we’re going to raise prices on everything which will likely have the same impact.
By economic growth I mean actual overall economic growth. E.g. if in some location, powering something by coal is more cost-efficient than powering it by solar but you convert to solar anyway, you are limiting economic growth. I do get that it may actually make economic sense if you count third-party effects - e.g. that replacing coal with solar makes the area a much nicer place to be, increasing the value of the land. But my point is that if you truly believe that cutting emissions is a road to increasing the wealth of your nation, you should be talking about increasing the wealth of your nation and adopting policies to that end and see emissions decrease as a side-effect.
Otherwise, there is a very easy way of reducing emissions - have people emigrate, make them unable to afford housing or afford to have children, shut down manufacturing and other economic activity, destroy infrastructure or allow it to decay.
Given that a lot of people, particularly young people, are struggling in many places in Europe and do not see a particularly bright future to put it mildly, and that China is growing at a rapid pace, unilaterally stunting your already barely-there economic growth just comes off as another act of self-flagellation by Europe.
I remember this 13 year old story about dismantling a German steel mill and sending it to China.
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/21/world/asia/21transfer.htm...
Here are two calculators for you to learn more about the topic:
https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/carbon...
https://www.nytimes.com/ask/answers/lower-personal-carbon-fo...
To give some perspective, in the case of the UK (which until this year had been an EU member):
"directly-produced carbon emissions peaked in 1972, total carbon emissions created by the UK economy peaked thirty-five years later in 2007"
So yes, "imported" carbon emissions can make a big difference, but even if you take them into account, the trend for total emissions has been downward for over a decade.
https://www.energylivenews.com/2019/10/21/imported-emissions...
The real problem is the US. High per capital emissions and weak commitments to reduce emissions
Manufacturing is dirty but then the whole world consumes these goods so that's not only a China problem
Well I do see far more electric vehicles in Beijing and in Washington DC if that's what you mean
Constructive criticism is good, but really, "meaningless"?
Comments like these make me worried about general built-up pessimism and negativity of the human race. We're not happy when anything happens, but then we're also surprised when nothing happens.
Statistics may be there, but they're just getting discussed and counter-argued infinitely until nothing happens.
Promises to do things in the future seem to be a mainstay of international climate discussions, from Kyoto to Paris and onward.
Details are complex and will matter in how effective this is and there's also a lot of resistance, so this is not decided yet. But it sounds like this is probably gonna happen.
If you produce an dohicky in the EU and it casues 1000 tons of emissions, and by doing things like greening your grid, moving transport to electric, etc, you drop that to 450 tons, that's great.
If you produce an dohicky in the EU and it casues 1000 tons of emissions, and you instead stop producing it, but instead import it from China, where it was produced with 1500 tons of emissions and used another 500 tons to transport it, that's terrible.