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> Want to reduce CO2? Start creating policies that favor domestic businesses and reduce reliance on places like China or India for consumer goods. Ding ding di

> Want to reduce CO2? Start creating policies that favor domestic businesses and reduce reliance on places like China or India for consumer goods. Ding ding ding! There's like 15 ships that produce more emissions than every car out there per year. The counterargument is that these are very efficient by volume. This is true. But... do we still need that? In my neck of the woods (middle of USA) You're still going to need to transport the car over land... If it was built more locally we wouldn't need nearly as much shipping in the equation. An interesting question I've had: What about the supply chain itself? As an absurdist example are we shipping raw iron from the US to China by boat for them to refine, only for them to then build it into a car and ship it right back to us? That one probably is not true, but... I wonder what cases we have where raw materials are being shipped to countries where labor is cheaper, lengthening the distance from raw to product, thus increasing emissions.

jvanderbot 7y ago
What you describe is a system that values the generation of wealth, and uses seemingly-logistically-foolhardly supply chains to exploit cost-of-labor imbalances to maximize profit. And likely as long as it is profitable to do this, we will, at massive non-financial costs.
- brmgb 7y ago
  > And likely as long as it is profitable to do this, we will, at massive non-financial costs. Note that there is a simple solution to this. You just need to price in the generated externality. That's what a carbon tax does. The fact that basicaly no country has one tells you a lot about what governments really think of the climate crisis.