Pollution From Asia Affects US Climate

I laught at the western countries when I look by Nudeboy · 2012-05-27 00:25 · Score: 4, Interesting

I'm European, but living long-time in Asia. I can't but laugh at USA and EU worrying about little things and having mundane pollution and trashing laws when I look around myself. Everything is packed in plastic (often multiple times), cars and mopeds fart tons of black gas and factories just dump their waste where they want.

Interestingly, while everyone trashes, places do tend to stay really clean, as people make money by collecting all the trash from streets and bringing it to recycling.

Re:I laught at the western countries when I look by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-27 01:32 · Score: 2, Insightful

Pollution and trash are NOT the same. Your streets can be sparkly clean and yet your air dirty as hell. That said, this article just reaffirms what we long known. Pollution is a global problem that affects everyone much like how cigarettes affects those next to you. That said, America is no saint either...
Re:I laught at the western countries when I look by gsgriffin · 2012-05-27 01:41 · Score: 4, Interesting

You're obviously not in India. Just got back from there myself. Never saw the sun directly in the five Weeks I was there and covered half the country. I can believe that a billion people cooking over wood burning fires everyday makes a difference. I've seen it.

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Re:I laught at the western countries when I look by Kreigaffe · 2012-05-27 01:51 · Score: 2

He's not in China, either. I'd not be shocked if this guy was the same troll posting for the past several months an endless string of posts pointing out how novel and better everything in "Asia" is than in the West. Never any specific nation, simply "Asia", and always the dumbest drivel you could possibly imagine "only Asia has restaurants! only Asia invites friends over!".. It's less entertaining and humorous than the cleanmypc spam

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Re:I laught at the western countries when I look by moonbender · 2012-05-27 01:57 · Score: 4, Insightful

I think the hope is that pollution standards will (continue to?) rise along with living standards in Asia, and at that point the West will already have developed certain practices and technologies that the newly developed countries can adopt. E.g. the price of PV panels has dropped significantly in the past years (along with the energy required to build them), fueled by an increase in demand in the Western countries. If it drops a bit more, it'll be cost effective enough to at least be a part of the strategy dealing with the rapidly increasing energy needs of the Asian countries. That's just the general argument and you don't need to "believe" in PV power generation to buy the argument itself.
Of course that's just one part of it, there's also the fact that despite much better environmental regulations, our per-capita emissions are still much worse (even you don't consider "exported" emissions via product manufacturing) and of course the fact that we've been emitting for a much longer time than the newly developed countries[0]. Those are moral arguments, the first one is more utilitarian -- e.g. even if you don't think per-capita emissions should be the important figure, the argument holds water.
[0] We have been emitting since the industrial revolution, that is. I wonder, though, considering the growth of both population and world economy -- 28% of the human hours lived were lived in the 20th century and, incredibly, "over 23% of all the goods and services made since 1AD were produced from 2001 to 2010" --, if the (CO2) emissions of the past 10 or 20 years don't exceed all emissions made prior to that.

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Re:I laught at the western countries when I look by magarity · 2012-05-27 02:40 · Score: 3, Insightful

I think both of you might not be parsing his comment correctly. He says he's been living in Asia long term and looks around himself to see belching smoke and dumping factories. You've seen the "I'm European" part and connected it to looking around Europe to see smoke and factories. I spent a couple of years in China and saw nonstop belching smoke and dumping factories.
Re:I laught at the western countries when I look by hairyfeet · 2012-05-27 05:17 · Score: 4, Insightful

Whether the guy is an idiot, a troll, or just a dumbass doesn't change one simple fact...Free Trade DOES NOT WORK because it is just what we see in TFA, we are simply exporting our pollution to the third world!
This is why i have been saying for years you just can't have free trade with countries like China and India which let corps dump toxins out the back and belch toxic clouds of filth into the sky because, and I'm sure the free market types will scream for me daring to point this out, but we live in a fishbowl folks and anything you dump on one side eventually affects everyone. all that crap dumped into rivers ends up in the ocean, all that crap in the air ends up carried over here or likewise settles in the oceans, it all comes around.
This is why we should simply not allow trade with countries that don't have similar environmental regulations to us, because all that is happening is the mutilnationals are playing three card monty with the pollution and they enjoy higher profits the more they pollute.
So frankly the "greenies" can stick it right in their ass, because as long as we allow multinationals to just pollute the third world while selling to the first all that green shit is fucking pointless. Its like simply throwing all the garbage in the basement and then bragging about how clean your house is, you're just putting the nasty shit out of sight, not actually doing anything about it. You can screw Americans with carbon credits and give huge tax breaks to electric cars but so long as damned near every thing in every store is made in pollution friendly countries then none of it will make a damned bit of difference, not a damned bit at all.

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Re:I laught at the western countries when I look by riverat1 · 2012-05-27 06:17 · Score: 2

"Clean coal" is an oxymoron.
Re:I laught at the western countries when I look by shutdown+-p+now · 2012-05-27 13:36 · Score: 2

Punishing every Chinese company solely because they are located in China is obviously wrong.

Not really, no. Think of it not as punishing the company, but as punishing the country. If they want free trade, they're welcome to it - just enact solid environmental protection laws.
Re:I laught at the western countries when I look by shutdown+-p+now · 2012-05-27 13:38 · Score: 2

1. Chinese government does not enforce private property rights.
2. The Chinese people as a whole feel that the pollution produced is worth the economic benefits to them. They prefer the increased material wealth over the non-polluted environment.
It's not just "their" environment they pollute. We all share the same globe, and every ton of toxins and greenhouse gases they dump into the atmosphere affects all of us. I don't see why we should subsidize the very same activities that we declare illegal within our own borders.

What blows around comes around by petes_PoV · 2012-05-27 00:25 · Score: 5, Insightful

And all the pollutants created in the USA gets dispersed on the wind to other places - as does the pollution from Europe and everywhere else on the planet. It's not that america is therefore suffering unduly - it's just that we should recgonise the world is a closed system and it's not a good idea to crap on each others doorsteps.

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Re:What blows around comes around by SvnLyrBrto · 2012-05-27 06:32 · Score: 2

eh?
The United Stated *DID* sign the Kyopto Treaty... while Clinton was president.
Then George dubya took office. And he never particularly cared for things like the notion that international treaties and obligations (or, for that matter, our own Constitution) should constrain him from doing anything he damn well pleased.

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Imagine all the people...

What a bunch of bullshit by aliquis · 2012-05-27 00:36 · Score: 5, Insightful

Rather pollution from US consumption affect the global climate.

Whatever it's pollution or animal slaughter it is the consumer who make the demand and got the power to choose.

The people in the US (and hence you could say the US) is the biggest polluters by far. And it make no sense to compare countries with differences in population size (I'm from Sweden so we never have to worry about pollution because we're such a small nation anyway?) but rather per capita.

If the Chinese and Indian people would live as the average person in the US I assume we would more than doubled the pollution? But they don't. And why should they who are far behind restrict themselves then people in the US doesn't?

I hate these kind of posts. The US consumers are the filthiest and they are the one who order all (well, not all..) that crap from China for instance. Stop complaining on people in China and India damnit.

You don't want global warming, pollution, ecological disasters and what not? Consume less. (Or rather just what nature provides on a local scale and take care about how you do it.)

Re:What a bunch of bullshit by erroneus · 2012-05-27 01:28 · Score: 4, Insightful

You cannot blame the supply. You cannot blame the demand. Those two things operate as they do and as they should. Almost no one acts out of conscience but rather out of self-interest.
The only way to fix such problems is "across the board," unilaterally, all at once. Regulation.
You can't blame people for being stupid. It is what we are. It is why government and regulation are simply necessary. Think about it. No one would voluntarily stop at an intersection without a stop sign or a stop light would they?

The Fish Bowl Effect... by xTantrum · 2012-05-27 00:37 · Score: 3, Insightful

This isn't news. There is already strong evidence indicating that circa 1970's/80's US pollution played a key part - if not the cause of - the 1980's Ethiopian Famine. I think people forget that we live in a fish bowl. Excuse the expression but what I shit you eat...and vice versa.

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Re:The Fish Bowl Effect... by argStyopa · 2012-05-27 02:08 · Score: 3, Insightful

I'd love to see a link to that "strong evidence".
The only thing I've seen suggesting this are CSIRO "reports" whose basis is essentially "laws were put in place in the west to reduce aerosol pollution in the 1990s, and the drought in the Sahel ended at the same time".
By that level of intellectual rigor, a decrease in world ninja populations directly caused WW2.
The idea that pollution in one area of the globe effects others isn't novel or even particularly new; the 'tragedy of the commons' has been a long-term issue for anyone concerned about the environment. However to look at the coincidental end of a drought event (roughly 1970-1985) and the passage of legislation at the same time is specious at best, or politically-motivated mendacity at worst.
Two very simple questions that the study chose not to answer:
- Passage of the laws was neither geographically nor chronologically homogeneous as the studies' authors would like to imply; to suppose that a 15-year drought 'suddenly' stopped because of their passage would require postulating a 'tipping point'. Tipping points are generally a sign of poorly-understood systems. Sure, TPs exist in nature, but more frequently they're just a sign of sophomoric science and failed interpretation; they are the scientific equivalent of hand-waving.
- If Western industrial pollution was the cause of the Sahel droughts, why did they START in 1970 when by every measure western industrialization was DECREASING? Remember, you've already posited a nearly-instant connection between turning off the pollution and the end of the drought.
It's absolutely logical to expect that an input (pollution) into a complex system has an impact somewhere else, but to believe this specific assertion would require some basis of faith in the first place - faith that the West is evil, white-guilt, whatever you want to call it.

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-Styopa
Re:The Fish Bowl Effect... by rtfa-troll · 2012-05-27 03:48 · Score: 4, Informative

This is not Wikipedia. If you want a citation just ask for one. Before you do that you are expected to do a bit of searching. However, since you are probably just going to go on whining, here's your citation. I'm not a qualified climate scientist so I can't tell you if it's true or not. However the same is certainly true of all the people who are going to come running in to tell us how it is completely made up.

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Re:The Fish Bowl Effect... by Rogue+Haggis+Landing · 2012-05-27 05:12 · Score: 4, Informative

This isn't news. There is already strong evidence indicating that circa 1970's/80's US pollution played a key part - if not the cause of - the 1980's Ethiopian Famine.
The Ethiopian Famine ran from 1983-1985, and was mainly caused by a civil war that ran for 17 years, and by disastrous government food policies in the wake of the "Red Terror" of the late 1970s and the construction of a Marxist state that poured all of its resources into its military. Sort of like a much less extreme version famine-prone North Korea. Wikipedia has a fairly weak article on the famine. It's worth noting that the famine began in 1983, but the major drought started in 1984. With a stable society and a reasonable government there would have been food shortages in 1984, but no more, and there definitely wouldn't have been mass starvation before the crops started failing.

Listen, I'm a bleeding heart environmentalist and sympathetic to the idea that the US has historically shit in its own bed, and continues to do so in certain ways. But citing any old thing as caused by US pollution makes environmentalists look like kooks. It's very bad for the cause.

Pollution in Asia... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-27 00:38 · Score: 5, Insightful

There's always a misconception from people in the U.S. that China and India are the polluters of the world. Please understand that they are the ONLY countries left that can manufacture all the stuff we need at bargain basement price. They are the reason why we can have a RC car for $24.99 or $5 for a 4GB USB flash drive. The majority of the factories and cars in these countries are used to make stuff and deliver for us. The average citizen of these countries use about 1/10 of the energy and resources of any developed countries. If only that the rest of the world stops consumerism and start paying more, please don't bitch about the pollution. We made it happen.

Re:Pollution in Asia... by gsgriffin · 2012-05-27 01:48 · Score: 4, Insightful

The cheap products aren't because they are allowed to pollute. There cheap because labour and materials are cheap. If forced, they could reduce their emissions and add little to no cost to consumers. Their governments don't care. Anyway, the brown skies of India are caused by a billion people cooking over wood burning fires a couple times a day. Been there a lot. Seen it with my own eyes.

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Re:Pollution in Asia... by Kreigaffe · 2012-05-27 01:56 · Score: 4, Insightful

Actually.... no.
That RC car, if produces in America, would still be 25 bucks.
Yeah, you heard that right.
When has anything ever decreased in price by moving production to China? Don't be silly. Moving production to China doesn't lower prices, it increases profits.

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Gee that wasn't forseeable by rolfwind · 2012-05-27 00:42 · Score: 4, Insightful

Just like it wasn't forseeable that trading with China (read: getting cheap labor in exchange for IP and quasi-building up their infrastructure closer to 1st world standards) would mean we're just making our own competent competitors for resources and business in the next generation.

Next up: Captain Obvious Reports that Invading Iraq has not been a cost effective means to reducing terrorism.

Passing the blame by galadran · 2012-05-27 00:54 · Score: 4, Interesting

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/env_pol_car_dio_per_cap-pollution-carbon-dioxide-per-capita

Per person, the USA is the worst country in the world for air pollution, whereas China and India are among the best. Even if you ignore population and compare absolutely, the USA produces 5x the pollution of India and roughly equivalent to the pollution of China.

If there is a smog cloud over North America, I would be looking much closer to home to find the source...

Re:Passing the blame by arisvega · 2012-05-27 01:08 · Score: 2

Per person, the USA is the worst country in the world for air pollution [..]
Not only that, but the USA is the only country not intending to ratify the Kyoto Protocol
.

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Re:Passing the blame by YrWrstNtmr · 2012-05-27 01:22 · Score: 2

Not only that, but the USA is the only country not intending to ratify the Kyoto Protocol [wikipedia.org]

Oh please. There are a few others. And Kyoto was so flawed from the start that some countries are actively withdrawing (Canada, Japan, Russia)
Re:Passing the blame by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-27 01:44 · Score: 2, Insightful

CO2 isn't smog. Smog is composed of CO, NO2, O3 and various particulate matter, all of which are substantially more dangerous than CO2 is.
Re:Passing the blame by galadran · 2012-05-27 03:13 · Score: 2

At best useless, at worst a deliberately tendentious metric. Might as well measure it by hair length.
Sure, the PER PERSON pollutant output of countries like India and China is low; they have BILLION(s) of people living essentially like pre-industrial primitives.
Let's use CO2, since you like that metric, but instead of using raw population numbers, let's take at OUTPUT: PPP.
US CO2 5.7 bill (tons/yr), China CO2 3.4 US PPP: $11 trillion. China PPP $7 trillion On that basis they're basically the same.
If we compare per-capita income - since you want to consider that whole population figure more proportionally: US citizens have a PPP income of $43K. China's is $7K. At that same proportion, China's pollution output should be barely 1 bill ton/yr - or in other words, they are putting out more than 3.5 TIMES more pollution per $1 that goes into their citizen's pockets, than the US.
What were you saying again about the US being the "worst in the world"?
If you want to dig deeper you're missing another crucial point, that also explains the PPP:CO2 imbalance.

A significant proportion of Chinese emissions are related to the manufacture of goods which are directly exported to the USA. That is to say, as American manufacturing capacity has declined over the last 50 years, the CO2 production has been outsourced to China. This explains the CO2:PPP imbalance as the majority of the manufactured goods/wealth are immediately exported back to America.

Additionally, this article is framed in the context of pollution over mainland America. We can explain away the reasons for the CO2 production, but fundamentally America is producing as much CO2 as China in absolute terms, despite a far lower manufacturing base.
Re:Passing the blame by budgenator · 2012-05-27 03:47 · Score: 2

That might have meant something if any of the countries that did ratify it, actually fulfilled their obligations under it.

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Re:Passing the blame by gsgriffin · 2012-05-27 13:07 · Score: 2

Like you said. You've never been to India. A billion people just there. A wood costs nothing because they cut it down.

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Go on by Swampash · 2012-05-27 00:58 · Score: 3, Insightful

Someone post a chart showing the world's oil consumption by country.

Re:Go on by amoeba1911 · 2012-05-27 01:06 · Score: 4, Informative

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2174rank.html U.S.A! #1
Re:Go on by houghi · 2012-05-27 01:47 · Score: 2

http://chartsbin.com/view/pdd

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this is how you convert climate change deniers by circletimessquare · 2012-05-27 01:05 · Score: 5, Funny

How do you defeat oil indistry propaganda that climate change isn't real for the faux news set?

Appeal to their nationalism and xenophobia:" China is forcing climate change on you and your beautiful country"

Now there is no question climate change is real: it's a dastardly Chinese Communist plot to destroy Amurrica!

The power of low IQ tribal paranoia.

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Misinformation, Lies and Statistics by dragisha · 2012-05-27 01:17 · Score: 4, Insightful

If, by any criteria, US does not top such charts, it's only because of outsourcing of manufacturing. Meaning - most of second-hand "smoke" is because of US consumption too.

Also, see this. Just for example, additional llustration:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/44781282/World_s_Most_Polluted_Countries

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Re:Its a blessing by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-27 01:17 · Score: 3, Insightful

"Our emissions are actually quite clean"

Dude, US is the mother of polluters. I'll just consider you tried to enact Steven Colbert and made a joke.

Re:Its a blessing by th3rmite · 2012-05-27 01:39 · Score: 2

Anybody who would say this has obviously not been around the world. I don't need to justify wanting clean air by saying that America is the worst country in the world.

It's our pollution too by wjcofkc · 2012-05-27 01:56 · Score: 2

We are after all essentially paying them to produce it.

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Re:Its a blessing by __aaltlg1547 · 2012-05-27 02:02 · Score: 4, Informative

Nope, China has that honor. They surpassed US carbon dioxide emissions years ago and in many other categories they are also the top polluting nation. The USA still exceeds them in per-capita carbon dioxide emissions.

Re:Its a blessing by oiron · 2012-05-27 03:16 · Score: 5, Informative

And its a gift to the rest of the world. Our emissions are actually quite clean; I"ll bet first world car exhaust is safer to breathe than 3rd world standard air.

Did you just literally say that your shit smells like roses?

The US is in the top bracket of polluting countries! Check this out...

Taking just CO2, the US is four times higher per capita, but China's higher overall. Same story with Sulphur... Here, the US is about 3 times as much as China.

In both cases, India is far behind both the US and China.

Again, let me repeat that our country is so clean that our piddly bit of pollution is cleaner than daily life in these countries.

Its a blessing to them to get our exhaust gasses. Its like manna from the gods.

The highest per-capita emissions, and the second highest totals - that's some pretty interesting mana you gods are giving us!

And now don't switch tactics and try to claim that it's necessary for your standard of living; just look at the UK and Germany with far lower levels of both CO2 and Sulphur per capita. It's possible, as long as you give your SUVs up.

Re:So... by CrimsonAvenger · 2012-05-27 04:40 · Score: 2

Interesting how they pay attention to pollution they can't control but ignore pollution they can control [thegrio.com]

Interesting link.

So, they've had an "epidemic of cancer since the early '80s".

The nuclear power plant they're blaming it on didn't exist until 1987.

The nuclear weapons facility they mention has been there since 1952.

So, they started getting cancer from a nuclear plant before it was built, while at the same time living next to another nuclear plant for 30 years without a cancer problem.

Wow. Just, wow....

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"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"

Re:Its a blessing by oiron · 2012-05-27 05:15 · Score: 5, Informative

Every time you deniers "call us on it", we link again and again and again to the real science. You ask for the data, the data is available. You cast aspersions on the data, and it's independently verified. You fund studies meant to show that there's no warming, the study shows that there really is warming.

When we "call you on it", you disappear into the woods.

Re:Its a blessing by Attila+Dimedici · 2012-05-27 05:41 · Score: 2

Taking just CO2

And right there is your problem, you do not understand what real pollution looks like. Real pollution causes people, wildlife, and plants to become sick and sometimes die within a short time period. A short enough time period that people don't have to be told how bad it is, they can see it for themselves.

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Re:Its a blessing by oiron · 2012-05-27 05:42 · Score: 2

Poor scaling... Take a look at a zoomed-in-version

The reason I picked CO2 and sulphur is that both were available on gapminder. If I want other pollutants, I'd have to hunt a lot deeper, and then the conversation would be stale. I'm all for looking at more data if we can find it.

Again, it's not my argument that the rest of the world needs to do nothing. I'm just saying that the guy I replied to was fundamentally saying that the US needs to do nothing. That, I think is specious.

Pollution you can smell by 0111+1110 · 2012-05-27 06:47 · Score: 3, Informative

The only US city I've lived in that had pollution you could smell and see was Los Angeles and that's at least partly because of the inversion layer. The last Asian country I lived in had a very different kind of problem. Because trash pickup was infrequent and unreliable and possibly expensive for some people most residents would burn their trash in their yard in plastic bags. The smoke and the scent of burnt plastic would permeate the air for hours nearly every evening. It was so bad that that was the reason I left. I just couldn't take it anymore. I was sick of the nearly constant smell of burning plastic. There were many nights when I tried to fall asleep while wearing a respirator. Yes, it was that bad.

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irony by pbjones · 2012-05-27 11:26 · Score: 2

the US outsourced manufacturing to Asia and Asia returns the goods and the pollution that resulted from it's manufacturing. Nice to see that Canada and Mexico are not affected, else they would have got a mention in the original post.

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Re:America never generate any pollution? by X0563511 · 2012-05-27 16:41 · Score: 2

So, even though we've "been there done that" we shouldn't be offering up for easy the lessons we learned the hard way?

No, Asia wants to say "you're not our daddy" and do things their own way, and learn it all the hard way unnecessarily.

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Re:America never generate any pollution? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-27 23:50 · Score: 2, Interesting

What sanctions are you referring to? The US hasn't sanctioned India over its oil purchases from Iran. Even though India is inadvertently supporting a regional rival. The U.S.- India Civil Nuclear Agreement was a huge win for India since they can continue nuclear trade even though they have never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The last sanctions I found any reference to were in 1998 as a result of India's nuclear tests that year.
I ask again, what sanctions are you referring to?

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