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"More trade" is the number one policy of our federal government,
even trumping national security as we can see with the
multi-dimensional China issue. "More Trade Agreements" is the
questionable method of pursuing the Prime Directive - despite the lack
of quantifiable link between those bulky trade documents and actual
increased trade (see the WTO study on this).
Food
safety has been an irritating pebble in the shoe of the
globalists. The environment could be the next pebble, conflicting
with the Prime Directive. (Of course there are many potential
pebbles, amounting to a load of gravel).
We know that every
smokestack the U.S. outsources to Asia increases CO2 pollution by up to
eight times. Scrubbers and efficient energy methods are not the
enforced norm in Asia.
But the transportation pollution itself is
astounding. Supply chains that are several thousand miles long
have fossil fuel burning engines humming in aircrafts, ships and ports
that would not otherwise be humming as much.
Thomas Friedman, a NY Times regular op-ed columnist who has not resolved his green-ness with his I-like-all-trade-agreements-but-don't-read-them position, points out that a single transworld route for a major European delivery company has major environmental consequences.
“We operate 35,000 trucks and 48 aircraft in Europe. We just
bought two Boeing 747s, which, when fully operational, will do nine
round trips every week between our home base in Liège [Belgium] and
Shanghai. They leave Liège only partly full and every day fly back to
Europe as full as you can stuff them with iPods and computers. By our
calculations, just these two 747s will use as much fuel each week as
our 48 other aircraft combined and emit as much CO2. [says Peter
Bakker, the chief executive of TNT, the biggest express delivery
company in Europe].”
Friedman says this is because the world is becoming "Americans" in
the bad sense of resource consumption, but does not connect the issue
to his trade lust.
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