Reply to How do we rationalize climate change with open free trade?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Free trade makes everyone wealthier. If you want the Indians, Brazilians, Chinese, and Nigerians to care about the environment, you have to bring up their standard of living. Trade does that. Compare the average income in China in the 1980s to now. Trade did that. Same for South Korea.

Poor people will burn coal and wood for heat and fuel. Poor people will over fish and cut down forests to graze their animals. Only rich people have the luxury to think about the environment.[/quote]

While this is generally true, it relies on lifting those standards of living by moving that manufacturing economy to someplace else - continuing the cycle.

Until the entire world has the same environmental standards that the US has, nothing changes. [/quote]

The only way the entire world can have the same environmental standards is if you lift the world's population out of poverty. Concern for the environment is a luxury good.[/quote]

And then you wouldn’t be able to cheaply manufacture anything, anywhere. Because a society only gets lifted out of poverty by access to cheap goods made somewhere else, that leaves disposable income for other things like homes, food, discretionary spending.

In a system like you describe, everyone would be back to baseline poverty again. [/quote]

Cheap goods is relative. The Chinese produce cheap goods. Their income is much less than that of the Europeans or Americans, but they are much wealthier than they were 30 years ago. China is moving away from coal toward renewable energy sources. China is developing electric vehicles that are cheaper than US EVs. China could not achieve that while it was a closed economy.

Somalis and Eritreans are not going to worry about the environment until their bellies are full.[/quote]

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