From the "Why China Could Blame Its CO2 on West" article in today's Wall Street Journal:
To understand the deadlock in the debate on global climate change, take a look at your iPod.I found this thought provoking.
The vast marjority of the world's MP3 players are made in China, where the main power source is coal. Manufacturing a single MP3 player releases about 17 pounds of planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
iPods, along with thousands of other goods churned out by Chinese factories, from toys to rolled steel, pose a question that is becoming an issue in the climate-change debate. If a gadget is made in China by an American company and exported and used by consumers from Stockholm to São Paulo, should the Chinese government be held responsible for the carbon released in manufacturing it?
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Advocates of the consumption-based approach argue it solves one of the key problems associated with the Kyoto Protocol, known as carbon leakage. This is the ideas that countries can reduce their own emissions by sending dirty industries abroad. The same countries may still import the finished goods from the developing world, creating a situation in which global carbon emissions rise, even as individual nations meet their targets.
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4 comments:
This is thought-provoking at least, especially since the main reason the US dollar is in a slump is the trade imbalance.
You have profit-hungry shareholders in giant American companies to thank for that, same with job outsourcing. Lou Dobbs likes to blame Mexico for stealing American jobs, very neatly forgetting that American companies gave those jobs away to put more money into already wealthy American pockets.
At least this argument begins to assign its blame in the right area. In the end, of course, we all have to live in the filth it makes, so who's right or wrong doesn't matter.
(And don't even get me started on the planned obsolescence built into those Chinese-made electronics - that's for another post.)
This just took the gleam of pleasure from my eye, for my iphone. Must you always make me think? You are SO getting recycled paper for a Holiday gift.
It wasn't so much the iPod that got me going, although I did think about the hundreds of millions that have been sold + all other MP3s. I started looking around at everything I have and wondered how much crap is in the air because of it. Damn, is nothing guilt free?
I'll have to get back to you on this one.
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