Then why post a graph of China vs UK CO2 emmisions? Relevance if it’s a non issue?Originally Posted by ChickenLips
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Then why post a graph of China vs UK CO2 emmisions? Relevance if it’s a non issue?
-Don____________
calling the graph police
Interesting graph but as with most statistics, lacks context. They should note that during the period of China's acceleration the increase was the result of the global move to make China their outsourced factory with the use of corporate tax incentives for offshore production. Most of that increase actually in China belongs to the global community that utilized offshoring corporate tax incentives so that the post-war acceleration in global GDP was driven off of the backs and development of China's manufacturing industry and their change from agrarian economy to industrial (I believe China had an agri crisis around postWW2 that resulted in a strategic shift to more industrial activity and labour was cheap coming out of a history as an agrarian economy). The trend lines should be adjusted using export data to reflect the increase in economic activity within the western countries that used China as their production facility (on the basis that they would have generated the same if they had kept that corresponding production on shore). So essentially that increase in trendline is our doing as the result of us having big modern homes, 3 TVs in our homes, etc, and all the other stuff we wanted for lower prices that we asked them to make for us for the last 50-60 years
thats a lot of words to rationalize China's CO2 output.
Again, assuming CO2 is the big sky dragon for the sake of a thought experiment. Which country(s) have more stringent emission controls. In a game of "would you rather" is manufacturing going to be cleaner in the west or China?
You can call it rationalizing or avoiding an intellectual/logical flaw in the conclusions drawn. I wonder if Tony presented it this way intentionally to increase click bait/response in the absence of free market/consumption context of the effect of the Nixon administration opening the door for China to the WTO (and related tax incentives to offshore production and the related side-effects).
As for thought experiment, we have had our share of manufacturing related issues with acid rain, damaging the great lakes, ongoing algae blooms, polluted air/smog, oil spills, other production disasters (and that's with offshoring a lot of the consumption driven manufacturing so would have been so much worse if done on-shore), so not sure we have a high horse to say it didn't/couldn't happen here. Hasn't China been the largest investor globally in renewable technology/infrastructure for 5+ years (maybe 10+)? If so, the changeover will take some time but will likely leap-frog us in the future.
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