Red, Green & Blue: Helping China Help Itself … and the Rest of the World
China's impact on the environment — usually for the worse — is making headlines almost daily: now number one emitter of greenhouse gases, melamine-tainted pet food, contaminated fish exports and on and on. Some Chinese citizens are bravely trying to lobby for change — and suffering consequences — but even officials acknowledge their country can do better. But will it?
As one of the leading consumers of Chinese goods, the U.S. has a responsibility to do what it can to encourage China to clean up its act — both for the sake of Chinese citizens and for the rest of the world as well.
An effective way to start would be to charge a carbon tax on Chinese goods entering the U.S. The tariff would provide an incentive for Chinese manufacturers to reduce pollution and boost efficiency, and the revenues on our side could support research into renewable energy sources or other conservation/sustainability projects. Like the old saying goes, "Money talks … "
Tags: carbon tax, china, climate change, exports, global warming, greenhouse gases, melamine, Red, Green and Blue
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July 10th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
Good Afternoon, Shirley!
I’d have to offer a bit of pause to what you are suggesting. Why punish our consumers with a China Tariff? I’d suppose you would want to index it somehow to their carbon production but you know government’s not ever going to let go of a new tax. Would other countries be affected?
Are we to add carbon footprint to trade relation status? For me human rights should have bumped them out of favored trade status long ago but our market and trade has helped reform China for the better I would say. Remember when they changed it from “Most Favored Nation” status to “Standard Normal Trade Relations”? Yep… that was for China.
I’d say let them huff it up for a while longer to assure the economic reforms take hold. They’ve got a burgeoning middle class now who isn’t shy about standing up to unfair government practices. And besides… all that smog they are generating is offsetting their increase in temperature due to greenhouse gasses
But since you mentioned food quality here’s an interesting story about China’s efforts to solve that problem. The person in charge of food quality was executed. I guess Ken Lay would have faked his death a lot sooner with execution as a possible sentence for malfeasance.
July 10th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
What you call "punishing" our consumers, Jimmy, could also be called protecting our manufacturers: U.S. companies have been hard-pressed to compete with cheap Chinese goods in part because of the artificially contained value of the yuan. Maybe a carbon tax would help even out that inequity. Besides, how many cheap plastic go-mugs and hair clips do Americans really need?
I'm with you, though, on the "Most Favored Nation" status thing: I was against granting such privilege to China then because of its poor human rights record, and feel even more strongly about it now that the environmental side has become so problematic as well. Has our favorable trade relationship with China benefitted the Chinese people? Of course. You're right: there's a growing (and increasingly vocal) middle class, and no American Mom tells her kid anymore: "Clean your plate: there are starving children in China who would love that meatloaf."
But the "wait-and-see" approach could be a dangerous one: there are already signs that the environmental messes in China are leading to greater social unrest (http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2119939,00.html) and some bad politics (http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/03/2258/), rather than to positive reform. Do we really want to take no action until 1.3 billion Chinese people suddenly realize there's not enough water (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0817-02.htm) to sustain them all, much less to keep all those factories operating? I'd say it's better for everyone if we take some action now to strongly encourage environmental reform on China's part.
July 10th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
As common-sense as protectionism sounds it never works. The bottom line is that they’ve got tons of unskilled and semi-skilled labor and a very low cost of living. Those two combine to form very inexpensive products.
I personally am not a ’stuff’ person but for people who are then I say let them buy all the cheap plastic go-mugs and hair clips they want. I’d like for those items to be inexpensive enough, though, so that the family budget will allow for them to have, say, a vacation at Disneyland, a day at the waterpark, a nice modern safe and fuel efficient car and maybe a set of new energy efficient doors and windows.
As we buy China’s stuff… there we grow another consumer base. With this consumer base and more people off of Maslow’s first step; so too will there be a tax base and a willingness of the emerging middle class to care about their environmental impact and the long-term health and welfare of themselves and their children.
The key to environmental advancement is elimination of poverty. Impoverished nations are all ecological disasters. Wealthy nations clean up and help others clean up as well.
This recent trend, though, of burdening economic advancement with the idea of global warming and declaring CO2 a pollutant is maniacally brilliant on the part of the anti-industrial environmental zealots and stands to ignorantly hinder the economic engine upon which the environment depends.
All of this worry about GW is just the latest http://volokh.com/posts/1149004430.shtml>“Alarmist and Armageddonist Factoid” to be used to advance an environmental cause. Not that there’s anything wrong with that except when it comes in conflict with general economic advancement and well being.
July 10th, 2007 at 10:52 pm
Jimmy, our differences on the subject of global warming are well established! : )
However, the environmental problems facing China go far beyond the threat of climate change (although the Chinese government is actually taking that fairly seriously): the political arm-twisting I referred to earlier happened when Beijing succeeded in getting the World Bank to eliminate from a report research showing that 750,000 people a year die prematurely in China because of pollution.
Whole rivers have already dried up, and large areas are turning into desert. Add onto that the growing middle-class that is giving up, en masse, traditional bicycles in favor of fossil-fuel-guzzling, pollution-emitting cars, and you’ve got serious concerns in the next couple of years, not decades.
The recent spate of news regarding slave labor, dangerous toys, contaminated toothpaste and poorly manufactured tires prove that, if someone’s buying, there’s always someone else ready to cut corners to provide what they’re looking for, dirt-cheap. If we take some initiative ourselves to encourage things in China to improve (whether it’s in the form of a carbon tax or something else), you can bet it will help speed along the processes of modernization and efficiency.
July 11th, 2007 at 12:58 am
Cheap goods have a hidden world wide cost. I heard on the radio (NPR, of course)that the World Bank’s Annual Report was edited to exclude a statistic that 750,000 died in China this last year, due to polution. This would almost be unbelievable, if I wasn’t aware of the deathrate in London, in the 40’s and 50’s from coal polution combined with inversions.
The bottom line is that this polution travels west and eventually contributes to North America’s environmental degredation, as well as general Global Warming.
A carbon tax on the purchasers could be used to help fix the problem at the source.
July 11th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
Their economic advancement is going to be the solution to the problem though. The Environmental Kuznets Curve puts them at a point where environmental conditions will eventually improve. What we are seeing now are basically growing pains and to do a linear projection on the poor state of their environment now ignores the history of every other developed country. Plus China has the added benefit of other countries blazing the trail for them with technological advancements in fuel efficiency, pollution control, etc.
Our environment is cleaner now than it has been in the last century. There’s no reason to believe China will not make the same advancements given sustained economic growth.
July 11th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Again we come to a fundamental difference in the way we view the world, Jimmy: while I agree in theory that continued economic advancements bring with them improved standards of living, greater manufacturing efficiencies and a cleaner environment, all that is based on the assumption of an unlimited supply of clean air, water and other natural resources.
A new report (http://www.nrdc.org/media/2007/070710.asp) from the NRDC provides a case in point: while it acknowledges cities in the Western U.S. like L.A. have made great strides in reducing water consumption and improving conservation, the fact that natural water supplies from sources like the Colorado have declined by 50 percent in the past eight years means more needs to be done if everyone wants water to come out of their taps and irrigation pipes 30 years from now.
Many of China's big cities are facing similar circumstances: rivers are drying up, fields are becoming deserts and the dust from those dried-up fields are choking farms, animals and people. If we're going to take advantage of China's cheap labor and goods, I believe we have a responsibility to find as many ways of possible to speed that country's transition to a more sustainable, environmentally friendly future.
Plus, napamat makes an important point: "The bottom line is that this pollution travels west and eventually contributes to North America's environmental degradation." Air and particulate matter aren't stationary, as you know: the dust and nitrous oxides and sulfur and other emissions from China's farms and factories do make their way around the globe, eventually.