As China continues its runaway pollution policies, it has come up with a proposal that has the world scratching its collective head. China is proposing that it should still not be held accountable for its massive pollution rate or that fact that it has overtaken the United States as the world’s leading greenhouse gas producer. Instead, it insists that countries buying its goods should be charged for the carbon dioxide that it is producing.
China’s top negotiator, Li Gao, has made the proposal in advance of a major conference in Copenhagen. Despite the fact that China has a growth rate of roughly ten percent a year and refuses to comply with international demands for pollution abatement, it insists that it should not be held accountable for its own pollution rate.
The conference will be the test for the Obama administration. The Bush Administration created an anti-environmental record that equaled that of China. However, all countries now have to step up and accept limitations. The argument that Western countries should be the only ones to accept restrictions is not just environmentally stupid but potentially disastrous as we approach the tipping point on pollutants. Countries like India and China are experiencing massive economic growth with massive increases in pollution. It has to stop and the Obama Administration has to have the courage to stand firm against these exemptions.
The Japanese are insisting that the U.S. and China must agree this round to restrictions. However, they should include India and other countries as well. The U.S. and China should bear the greatest burden but the idea of exempting other countries has to be addressed.
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All those lovely inexpensive goods we buy in the ”Pound shops”
are being manufactured under an environmentally inefficient Chinese industrial system.
We are cutting our own throats in accepting the present set=up.
China pollutes. We pay for it.
I wish China every success in growing her economy. But we should remember that many of these products are possibly made within the 80 – 90 million Chinese Gulag.
Globalisation may not always be such a good idea. We have rrowing high unemployment in our own countries. It is not a good ides that we build up such a huge indebtedness towards China. China is now in a position where she is in a position to start buying large swathes of our Western economies. I do not relish being under the economic thumb of China.
Both good points. The traditional opposition, of course, was based upon the theory that developing countries should be given some latitude in their efforts to “catch up” with the developed countries. That argument should no longer be available to China. However, their position is quite clever, sort of a reverse value added tax. Besides, it is an established principle of business in this country that the cost of environmental compliance be passed on to consumers.
It actually does kind of make sense. We could implement it as an import duty on Chinese-made goods, which would encourage the consumer to buy goods from countries with less of a carbon footprint.
Maybe someone should explain the meaning of “be careful what you wish for” to the Chinese gov’t.
It makes sense to me. The UK for one has managed to lower its carbon emissions, mainly through out-sourcing them to China by moving industrial production there.
In a market economy of supply and demand, there needs to be a recognition that the consumer is as responsible for emissions as the producer.