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We have shredded our food safety system with gargantuan increases in
imported food. Decades were spent making our food safer after
Upton Sinclair wrote "The Jungle" in 1920, and we passed comprehensive
food inspection laws in the 1960's.
We have shredded our
pollution reduction system with gargantuan increases in the rate of
outsourced industries. Decades were spent making our air, water
and landfills cleaner since the first environmental laws were passed in
the 1970's.
The New York Times Editorial Board loves trade
without trade law enforcement... and hates pollution, including the
vast brown cloud and toxic waters emanating from China. The two
views of that multi-headed editorial board cannot be reconciled.
Trade and outsourcing may be the biggest environmental problem today.
(read more)
Today's
editorial by that board spells out the China pollution problem, but
blindly fails to connect it to outsourcing industry. The piece
starts with this quote:
In 1991, Lawrence Summers — then the World Bank’s chief economist
and later Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary — wrote a memo suggesting
that the bank should encourage the world’s dirty industries to move to
developing countries. The forgone earnings of workers sickened or
killed by pollution would be lower in low-wage countries, he noted,
while people in poor countries also cared less about a clean
environment. “The economic logic of dumping a load of toxic waste in
the lowest-wage country is impeccable,” he wrote.
Then this accurate observation is made:
China makes more than a third of the world’s steel, half of its
cement, about a third of its aluminum. It also consumes more coal than
the United States, Europe and Japan combined. Its environmental
degradation is a match for Dickens at his bleakest: airborne pollution
causes more than 650,000 premature deaths a year. ... The problem
doesn’t stay there. China is about to surpass, or has already
surpassed, the United States as the world’s biggest emitter of
greenhouse gases.
Here are additional facts. U.S. environmental laws actually
control pollution. The "industry" category's share of total U.S.
carbon emissions is less than half the "industry" share of China's
overall emissions. (Other major contributing categories are
power, transportation, residential, etc.).
This
is because U.S. environmental laws and U.S. industry have made large
gains in cleaning up their act, better than most countries have.
But as the NY Times and the U.S. government promote all outsourcing of
industry as "the market working", as opposed to recognizing policy
failure, we not only outsource pollution, but increase it. Imagine
shipping a load of American made, low level radioactive waste to a
poor, Western Sahara country for burial/disposal... and by the time the
cargo reached Africa, it had expanded to eight shiploads. And
then imagine that after disposal, the radiation was being emitted to
expose populations across the world. That is what we are doing.
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