[asa] China Grabs West’s Smoke-Spewing Factories

 From today's New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/21/world/asia/21transfer.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

HANDAN, China — When residents of this northern Chinese city hang their
clothes out to dry, the black fallout from nearby Handan Iron and Steel
often sends them back to the wash.

Half a world away, neighbors of ThyssenKrupp’s former steel mill in the
Ruhr Valley of Germany once had a similar problem. The white shirts men
wore to church on Sundays turned gray by the time they got home.

These two steel towns have an unusual kinship, spanning 5,000 miles and
a decade of economic upheaval. They have shared the same hulking blast
furnace, dismantled and shipped piece by piece from Germany’s old
industrial heartland to Hebei Province, China’s new Ruhr Valley.

China’s worsening environment has also upended the geopolitics of global
warming. It produces and exports so many goods once made in the West
that many wealthy countries can boast of declining carbon emissions,
even while the world’s overall emissions are rising quickly.

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It is not clear to me how to factor this kind of effect into carbon
emissions. Should the purchasing Country of the goods produced be
required to assume responsibility for all the carbon emitted in their
production??? This may sound good but would be a bureaucratic nightmare
and in itself would produce more carbon from the staff and computers
used to track it. At the very least the developing countries must be
included in agreements to limit carbon emissions.

Dave W (CSCA member)

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Received on Fri Dec 21 07:19:57 2007