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Can we soon start talking about the largest elephant in the room - China and their global junk manufacturing industry - seeing how China commits approximately t

• Rinzler89 2y ago
  > - China and their global junk manufacturing industry And who orders, buys and pays for all the junk? The western consumers. Who offshored their own dirty manufacturing industry to China due to their lack of workers/human rights and environmental protection? The west. Which companies profited the most from this offshoring to China? The western ones. Same for the textile/clothes industry. So I think you're looking at the wrong elephant. Look at your elected leaders first for failing to regulate "free trade" for the sake of profiteering at the expense of the environment. The hypocrisy of the rich western nations blaming the environmental damage on the poor countries to which they knowingly and willingly offshored their dirty industries to for profit, is mind boggling. Also, the hypocrisy of western tech companies when dealing with China is equally grandiose: -China's CCP: "So US big tech, you will have to host your data here and build backdoors to your services for us so we can read all your customer data and spy on your users here. Take it or leave it." -US big-tech: "Yessir! Right away CCP! Which other way should we bend over to make money in China?" -EU regulators: "So we're gonna need you to be upfront to your users here about your privacy invasive tracking and give users and opt-out option, and also not block your smaller competitors from accessing your gate-kept market places" -US big-tech: "Noooo! That's tyranny! Uncle Sam help, your poor tech monopolies are being oppressed by the Europeans."
  • waihtis 2y ago
    No I'm with you, the multinational corporations are a major culprit in this.
    • querez 2y ago
      It's the consumers first and foremost. The multinationals are just doing what's in their best interest.
      • jwells89 2y ago
        Multinationals are not blameless even if consumers ultimately create demand. It was them that has been working overtime for around a century now developing marketing and figuring out how to manipulate human psychology to convince consumers to buy as much as possible, creating the culture of consumerism we have today.
      • triceratops 2y ago
        Consumers didn't ask oil companies to run multi-decade campaigns of lies. Your second sentence is accurate but incomplete - the management of multinationals did what was in the best interest of the management.
  • liveoneggs 2y ago
    What is the purpose or context of this thinking? To infantilise and absolve China?
    • darkwater 2y ago
      To put the blame in the right place, perhaps? Obviously China (and its government) has its own responsibilities as well, but it all started with Western companies (and the Western lifestyle)
      • c048 2y ago
        China said yes to all those things for Western money. They could've said no, they could've put in restrictions to lower their profits and improve conditions. Don't act like China is some poor puppy bullied around by the West.
        • Rinzler89 2y ago
          >China said yes to all those things for Western money. They could've said no Terrible argument. If it's not gonna be China, it's gonna be Vietnam, or Bangladesh, or Pakistan, or Sri Lanka, or whoever the rich west will deem fit to host their dirty industries at the most rock bottom prices so they can make a profit. So again, is really all China's or $POOR_NATION fault, or the West's fault for constantly bidding the poor countries against each other in a race to the bottom in terms of human rights and environmental destruction for the sake of profit? Just blaming the poor countries claiming that "well, the poor countries should just say NO to hosting the west's dirty industry", is incredibly stupid and short sighted.
          • card_zero 2y ago
            So, in your mind, China's industry is really the West's? Also, China is poor? Just a poor passive obedient victim of the West's desires?
          • _djo_ 2y ago
            Do you really think that China would not have industrialised if not for Western companies? Nothing about China's history shows that that's remotely true. In fact, outsourcing was only possible because of the various industrial plans that China had put in place in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, all of which prioritised building equivalent capacity to what existed in the West and the USSR. Moreover, China was destroying its environment in the 1950s already, long before it even allowed real trade with the West. Let's treat countries as responsible actors in their own right, not as mere non-independent reactors to Western actions.
  • misja111 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • Rinzler89 2y ago
      >Who gets paid for selling all the junk? If a building contractor is known to use salve labor and dump the waste in the lake of the next town nearby, do you report him to the authorities to shut him down, or do you knowingly and willingly engage in business with him to do landscaping/work on your house for cheap despite knowing this about him, because it's profitable for you as well? If it's the latter, who's fault is it then? Is it really all his fault, or is it also your fault because you want things to be as chap as possible so you aid him at breaking the law and stay quiet, as long as you get your cut? If it's not gonna be China, it's gonna be Vietnam, or Bangladesh, or Pakistan, or Sri Lanka, or whoever the rich west will deem fit to host their dirty industries at the most rock bottom prices so they can make a profit. So again, is really all China's or $POOR_NATION fault, or the West's fault for constantly bidding the poor countries against each other in a race to the bottom?
      • linuxftw 2y ago
        Yeah, but how else will you get the new iPhone with 27 cameras that can make you prettier than you actually are?
      • Workaccount2 2y ago
        Generally I think it is most fair to place the larger slice of blame on the one who originally presents the opportunity. These entities also tend to try and be opaque about the dubious methods they are using to undercut everyone else. Talk to that building contractor and they will swear that they pay their employees well and responsibly manage all waste. Of course, you still bear the remaining slice of blame since you kinda knew they were lying and went along with it anyway.
    • Miraltar 2y ago
      The way I see it, blaming China is useless, as long as we behave the same, they gain too much to try changing.
  • AtlasBarfed 2y ago
    The blame resides with the demand side / consumers. And the fact the lords of capitalism only care about power and bank account size, and the scienze/religion of economics can't see further than three months into the future.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• deelowe 2y ago
  Should the conversation be production or consumption? Who's really to blame?
  • waihtis 2y ago
    I agree, there's roughly three parties to blame, the large corps, the junk manufacturers and the idiots who buy cheap chinese junk en masse
    • bel-crow 2y ago
      This might be ever so slightly off-topic and a silly question but why aren't sites like SHEIN being banned like Tik-Tok? They cause infinite harm, and clearly we're capable of banning big chinese sites, so why the holdup on SHEIN/Temu? I saw news about Congress members in the US calling for bans last year but nothing happened.
      • deelowe 2y ago
        Because TikTok was likely banned for not cooperating with intelligence agencies or perhaps cooperating with the wrong ones.
  • liotier 2y ago
    Carbon tax, including as international tariff would sidestep that question, make the emitter pay and let the consumer choose.
  • brightball 2y ago
    When it comes to regulations, production. Stricter laws in the US just lead to shipping production overseas to locations with less strict regulation.
    • itishappy 2y ago
      Regulate trade. Carbon taxes on production and shipping disincentivize this.
• onion2k 2y ago
  Per capita the US would be on top.
  • goatlover 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • fmobus 2y ago
      That's a bad argument. If Americans would emit CO2 at the same per capita rate as china, the world would be much better off. The fact that the Chinese can emit much less per capita and at the same time have raised their standards of living significantly over the last few decades, all while producing a huge fraction of manufactured goods consumed worldwide goes to show that something is deeply wrong with the US' policy on this subject.
      • goatlover 2y ago
        If Americans emitted the same per capita rate as China, they would have a lower standard of living. This shouldn't be the argument anyway. The focus should be on cleaner and more efficient technologies, which includes nuclear.
        • itishappy 2y ago
          > This shouldn't be the argument anyway. Why not? The reverse sounds more insightful: If the rest of the world adopts and American standard of life, emissions would be much higher. Should we expect the world to adopt a sub-US standard of living forever, or should we address the impacts of our standard of living?
          • goatlover 2y ago
            If the rest of world adopts the American standard of life, that means technology continues to progress, and there's a lot more highly educated people innovating. Given that sustainability and climate change are serious concerns now, I don't agree that it will continue to be a bad thing.
• thaanpaa 2y ago
  Did you miss the climate agreement they committed to in November?
• belter 2y ago
  That is unfair on China, since they manufacture lots of the dirty stuff the rest of the world outsourced on them.
  • waihtis 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • EGreg 2y ago
      That’s actually pretty good logic. Drug dealers should be regulated, not imprisoned.
    • belter 2y ago
      It was US business who drove the outsourcing led by companies like Apple or Walmart. Otherwise each IPhone would cost 10.000 dollars...
      • Workaccount2 2y ago
        Because of opportunities created by China. When walmart moves into a town and kills the local shops, is it Walmarts fault for bringing cheaper prices or is the locals fault for moving all their shopping to walmart?
      • _djo_ 2y ago
        China's most polluting industries aren't its high tech phone and car factories, which are generally fairly modern. It's the mass of mid-level factories that produce cheap items for the entire world, but predominantly for the developing world. The idea that Chinese pollution wouldn't exist if not for Western outsourcing is a myth.
    • fmobus 2y ago
      If the global manufacturing was centered in the US instead, we would probably much worse of in terms of CO2 emissions.
• fmobus 2y ago
  These numbers say more about the US than China, if you control for population. And also, I keep seeing those numbers thrown around, but it's never clear if it's on the production side or the consumption side. If it's the production side CO2, then we have to remember that a huge fraction of carbon emitted by China is for the benefit of consumers in the western countries. Which makes you think, just wtf is the us doing that emits that much carbon per capita?
  • card_zero 2y ago
    > if you control for population But why would you control for population? So there are a vast number of Chinese who can't afford a large share of China's emissions, so what? What's your mindset here, that we have to determine the most guilty individual person and ignore governments? There may be lots of people in China but it's one government and it's emitting a lot, in absolute terms. Is Liechtenstein (population under 40,000) potentially a huge priority for us to consider in regard to tackling emissions? Their per capita figure could be enormous. You should not care even if it is, because in absolute terms it will be trivial. To answer your question: transport. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector-stacked?country=~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector-s... If you switch to China, this slice is taken over by manufacturing and construction.
    • abdullahkhalids 2y ago
      > But why would you control for population? Because the amount of changes that a society has to make in how it lives to get to net zero is determined by how much each person emits. The average US person emits 15 tons CO2 every year (there is distribution about it). The average China person emits half that. So obviously the US has to make a larger change in the structure of society. Of course, it is better to subdivide even further. One way that is popular is to estimate how much do super rich emit and what the average emit, and of course the super rich have to be reigned in a lot more than the average person.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
• mytailorisrich 2y ago
  Pointing the finger at China is ridiculous. China has more than 4 times the population of the US so it would be reasonable to expect that they actually emit more than 4x the CO2 of the US. Your numbers show that they actually emit 'only' just more than twice the US, and bearing in mind that they are indeed the world's factory. So your numbers show that the US (and Russia) are doing badly and that the EU is doing relatively well. They also show that a global cut in CO2 emissions is and will remain extremely hard when combined with population and development targets (India emits very little compared to population, for instance).
  • _djo_ 2y ago
    The US's per capita CO2 emissions have dropped by around 70% since 1990. It should've been a larger drop, to match that of the EU, but nonetheless it's a highly positive trend that also proved that per capita emissions can be divorced from per capita GDP growth, something that was previously uncertain. Moreover, this happened while US manufacturing output remained fairly constant. China's per capita emissions have more than quadrupled over the same period, and are showing no signs of slowing down. At this rate it'll soon eclipse the US's per capita rate. You mentioned India, which is a much better example of a low per capita rate.
    • mytailorisrich 2y ago
      That's why I mentioned development, which is key to understand current status, evolution and where things are going. The world simply cannot emit like the US do per capita. China's emissions have increased because the country has been developing and Chinese are still quite poorer on average than Americans. India is still low because they are behind in terms of development and they don't (yet) produce for the world. I am not sure what point you are making. My point is simply that population varies wildly per country so pointing the finger at China because they emit the most as a country is nonsensical. Emission per capita is a much better metric. I am not sure there is any way to combine development and drastic reduction in emissions with 10 billion people on the planet, but I am sure that the US are doing worse than China when you do a valid comparison that must take population into account. > Moreover, this happened while US manufacturing output remained fairly constant. The issue there is that output is measured in dollar value, not raw volume or mass of stuff, which may be better correlated with emissions. Many intrinsically polluting and lower value industries have been outsourced to China with output imported.