That is incredibly short sighted.

The reason why you don’t see that much pollution in your country is that it has been outsourced to other countries with more lax pollution laws and less worker protection laws. This means that fabrication of an item produces more pollution than if it was built in your country (where there’s more regulation). And then there’s even more pollution due to the long transportation haul.

But you get a cheaper price tag. And your rivers are clean.

But think about these things when putting blame.

Germany and the US also export a tremendous amount of goods, and do so without clogging up our rivers (and eventually the ocean) with trash.

And studies have shown that only 15% of China's CO2 emissions are for the production of exports. That means that 85% of their CO2 emissions are for local production. [1]

Lastly, the amount of economic value the US and other advanced nations produce per unit of Co2 is much higher than China, which is one of the least efficient from Co2 to value. [2]

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15883-9

2. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?most_...

That's mostly due to the TYPES of exports involved.

The US exports cars, steel, cotton, natural gas, coal, plastics, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and on and on.

On the note of pharmaceuticals and India, there’s a stark difference. Indian manufacturers dumb literal tons on antibiotics and their byproducts into rivers, and no US pharma company does this at all.

Can you back that up with evidence? I'm not sure what the situation is for Europe/the UK, but for the US it really doesn't seem to be the case that we are outsourcing our emissions:

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/no-the-us-didnt-outsource-...

I believe the “consumption-based CO2” graph used on the article, which is the main pillar, falls short on three accounts:

* It measures the CO2 it takes to constuct, but leaves (seems to leave out) the CO2 cost of transportation. When a TV has to travel around the world that cost isn’t trivial.

* The article focuses on CO2 exclusively. If a TV made in China produces about the same CO2 as one done on shore, all is good, even if the former involves (for example) dumping acid into a river, which would be illegal in the US. Even if we want to keep the discussion exclusively about climate change, other emissions must be taken into account. Methane for example is 50 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2.

* The whole part about it being “only” about 18% in the case of Europe (that’s a lot!) and that “it has not changed much in the last 30 years” (that makes it worse!)

Maybe it's not to the extent that people are saying, but the charts clearly show that the EU and the US do outsource their emissions.

Yes, but not to a sufficient degree that is congruent with the point people are trying to make (ie, that the outsourced emissions swamp the decrease in domestic emissions). Net emissions from the developed world -- in aggregate and per capita -- are declining.

In the same way that any imports involve extraterritorial emissions. The US manufacturers a lot of things and and does so with pretty good environmental standards compared to most other places.

At least for CO2, emissions haven’t been outsourced much. At least, emissions in developed countries are still falling when adjusting for trade. Most of the rising emissions in developing countries like China and India are due to them getting richer rather than becoming the worlds factories. I don’t know how other pollutants compare. Likely worse as they are not an issue for western companies to care about so much.

On CO2: https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

Not at all, no. You know whats short sighted tho? Skipping the part where i said we _all_ need to do our part and that there is pollution here as well, and jumping straight into deflecting the blame on to “us” while not doing enough.

We are to blame and are not doing enough though. Your action needs to start from there or it's just excuses.

We do carry some of the blame. But we are not responsible for local politicians all too happy to accept bribes and societies all too happy to close their eyes. Why are there no strong environmentalist movements in india? Is it a democracy or not? Cant people in china see whats happening with their rivers and cities? You cant possibly have one billion people sitting idle and doing nothing to change the status quo, and then shift the blame on us.

I actually don’t blame “they” or us. I blame the extremely rich, of all nations. And then that trickles down.

The fact that we all seem to agree that rich countries will pay a premium to keep their rivers clean seems to at the very least undermine the central argument of the article that capitalism places zero value on preserving the environment.

Where do you think all the products manufactured in China are going?

The west is taking advantage of cheap labor in China and pushing all the externalities there. You're using a computer or smartphone that was presumably largely made in China to post this message.

To then turn around and say that climate change is entirely China's fault is absurd. You have to look at what countries are actually consuming the products leading to the emissions.

You're also conflating localized pollution with co2 emissions.

Consumer demand isn't the problem. The willingness to ignore pollution, labor conditions and safety in order to produce goods at the lowest price is.

> Where do you think all the products manufactured in China are going?

China consumes most of what they are making today. What do you think is happening? China is very different today than 20 years ago.

Do they not use computers or smartphones in China?

When exactly did they say they were not? They stated the opposite:

>"You have to look at what countries are actually consuming the products leading to the emissions."

Yes, that was the point.

Did the demand for products from polluting industry disappear in the developed world or did the factories just move overseas? Shifting blame to "underdeveloped and corrupt nations" does nothing to address the fact that developed countries still demand goods from polluting industry and do little to promote more sustainable forms of economic development.

There is no such thing as a polluting industry- or rather, any industry at all could be a polluting one. Pollution is a waste byproduct of what is being produced. The act of polluting is disposing of said byproducts in an unmanaged way (out smokestacks, into rivers, etc).

my take is that western and developed nations are just exporting all their problems to developing/manufacturing countries. it's not like europeans don't consume products that cause pollution, they just export the processes that create that pollution to other countries. if anything, europeans/americans are responsible for the majority of the pollution in china/india as a vast percentage of the goods produced end up being consumed in the western/developed nations anyway. i think europeans should feel guilty when they see the disparity in pollution- norwegian streams and beaches may be clean but they can only do that because they import their goods from factories in other countries and send their oil to be burned elsewhere.

Western nations are generally very good hiding their dirty business out of sight. Exporting pollution to other countries is one thing. You see the same with animal farming. In China you see the bad treatment of animals in the open on markets where in the west we hide the same cruelty in locked down farms that most people never see. When we tell poorer countries to preserve wildlife we do this while we have eradicated all inconvenient wildlife in our own area.

In 2021 China and the Europe have the following Wind Power Capacities (MW):

China: 328,480 Europe: 235,712

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_European_Uni...

China also produces the majority of Solar PV Panels - https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/solar-pv-manu...

China population is 1.4B Europe population is 700M

What is your point ?

Probably that China subsidizes the West’s efforts to green their economies while simultaneously handling our negative externalities, AND continuing to lift their population out of poverty.

The parent claim is that the developing world isn’t pulling their weight, which is an incredibly ignorant and frankly stupid take, considering any historical context.

Ignoring all that, per capita China has a long way to go to be anywhere near the top of the list for climate impact: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...

This has to be a troll post.

But I guess it is near the top because the rebuttals got upvoted so much.

> Wondering what are countries such as china and india doing to maintain a cleaner planet if anything at all

They did SO gigantic a reforestation that it is visible from space.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144540/china-and-in...

> We keep blaming ourselves while underdeveloped and corrupt nations pollute virtually everything in the their management.

That literally sounds like supremacist, 'we are civilized' nonsense.

Those countries are literally the world's factories. Majority of the emissions of those countries belong to Western corporations. Except they are recorded as those countries emissions.

And the West arrogantly tries to sell them 'carbon credits' - another financial scam - have another country manufacture your products in sweatshops and have little emissions. Then make them buy 'carbon credits' from you.

Is there any evidence whatsoever that the "majority of the emissions of those countries belong to Western corporations"?

From what I've seen, the vast majority of the emissions/pollution from China and India are byproducts of them supporting their own citizens. It's not all exports. It's not majority exports.

> Is there any evidence whatsoever that the "majority of the emissions of those countries belong to Western corporations"?

Just check how much of offshored manufacturing is in China...

Yeah i was wondering how soon will i be accused of racism, or something similar. I suppose supremacism is near enough.

I am glad india and china are leading the way in reforestation. The same kind of good progress should be made in cleaning up all the harm done from industrial pollution and garbage.

Oh and please spare me the “financial scam” thing. We are drowning in taxes to keep our “supremacist” stuff clean, it doesnt come out of the blue. We get fined, taxed and educated in all ways possible. Please pressure your representatives in any way you can, or communist party leaders if possible, instead of deflecting blame and throwing around conspiracy theories. We only have on planet.

We literally pay them to do it. Where do you think things come from? We command all that with our money.

That's kind of the point of the article: it's all capitalism. (Despite the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, it's run under "capitalism with Chinese characteristics".)

Capitalism is the reason we have climate change: the environment is an externality that isn't priced in, and so it's treated as zero cost. Anybody who tries to incorporate that cost single-handledly will be at an economic disadvantage to somebody who doesn't, and capitalism will destroy the former and reward the latter.

That doesn't prescribe the solution, which is going to be a complex balance of millions of factors (both current and historical). Large, poor countries will have to play their parts, too.

But the lesson here is to identify what got us into this situation so that we can hope to find a way out. The free market caused it, and maybe it can be part of the solution -- but not unless there is also a non-free-market portion in which we all agree to stop treating the atmosphere as an infinite carbon sink.

It's only at that point that the real search for solutions can begin. But it's never going to happen while one country -- one of the largest carbon emitters both per-capita and collectively -- is unable to act because of enormous political influence from people who insist that it's a hoax.

> the environment is an externality that isn't priced in, and so it's treated as zero cost.

Was there ever a point in human history where this was NOT the case?

>it's run under "capitalism with Chinese characteristics"

Not sure if you're using the quote to imply that's the position of the chinese government, but their line is "Socialism with Chinese characteristics"[1], not capitalism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_with_Chinese_charact...

>Capitalism is the reason we have climate change: the environment is an externality that isn't priced in, and so it's treated as zero cost. Anybody who tries to incorporate that cost single-handledly will be at an economic disadvantage to somebody who doesn't, and capitalism will destroy the former and reward the latter.

How do you explain the communist regimes out there that also consume fossil fuels?

Western countries have existed under centrally-managed economies for over a hundred years. I don’t know where this free-market blame comes from.

Build nuclear plants. No communism necessary.