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> China is producing Is it? Chinese companies are doing it for the profit, no doubt. But the West's unsustainable consumption standards should share the blame

> China is producing Is it? Chinese companies are doing it for the profit, no doubt. But the West's unsustainable consumption standards should share the blame. China only do this because the West buy. And Western companies shift their production to China for cheaper labour, mainly. Many American companies are actually doing the polluting. Not only Chinese companies produce in China. So, in a world with blurry boundaries, please take into account the production of Western companies, in Chinese physical borders, and stuff that China export to the West. It is China now, it will be India, too, some years into the future. Where you write from the third iPhone (produced in India) that you bought in the last two years, that India and China are to blame for the pollution, where your second big heavy car sits in the garage, the rare earth minerals for which were mined in China, for an American company, and a roomba cleans your floor (also produced in China), that reads "carbon-neutral". You just hear the bell, and someone delivers your pizza, who is a climate refugee from a small pacific island. You are not to blame. China and India are polluting!

aesh2Xa1 1y ago
I think you're ignoring the fact that China is, factually, the leading greenhouse gas emitter. Your argument has now shifted to focus on consumer demand. Yet, even examination of this angle will reveal that China's state policies create the artificially low prices that fuel that consumption. The issue isn't simply that "the West buys things." It's that China's government actively engineers this hyper-consumption as the Chinese economic policy. The CSIS (link below) describes this as a system of "nonmarket policies" and "state-driven overproduction." This is accomplished through massive government subsidies that allow Chinese companies to operate at a loss and "dump" cheap goods onto the global market. The "unsustainable consumption" you describe is, therefore, a direct response to a market deliberately distorted by China for the sake of its economic ambitions. Furthermore, the CSIS article explicitly states that these dumping policies support China's "pollution-intensive" and "carbon-intensive" manufacturing. All this is to show that the problem is not reducible to consumer choice, but more so a deliberate strategy by the Chinese state. https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-steel-and-aluminum-tariffs-wont-solve-chinese-dumping-problem https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-steel-and-aluminum-tariffs-...

aesh2Xa1 1y ago

I think you're ignoring the fact that China is, factually, the leading greenhouse gas emitter. Your argument has now shifted to focus on consumer demand. Yet, even examination of this angle will reveal that China's state policies create the artificially low prices that fuel that consumption. The issue isn't simply that "the West buys things." It's that China's government actively engineers this hyper-consumption as the Chinese economic policy. The CSIS (link below) describes this as a system of "nonmarket policies" and "state-driven overproduction." This is accomplished through massive government subsidies that allow Chinese companies to operate at a loss and "dump" cheap goods onto the global market. The "unsustainable consumption" you describe is, therefore, a direct response to a market deliberately distorted by China for the sake of its economic ambitions. Furthermore, the CSIS article explicitly states that these dumping policies support China's "pollution-intensive" and "carbon-intensive" manufacturing. All this is to show that the problem is not reducible to consumer choice, but more so a deliberate strategy by the Chinese state. https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-steel-and-aluminum-tariffs-wont-solve-chinese-dumping-problem https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-steel-and-aluminum-tariffs-...