Exporting Our Industry: exporting our pollution

(Before It's News)

When the great western democracies exported their smokestack industries and their manufacturing and processing industries to the developing world they did so to make money, or to make more money. There are two reasons why you can make more money by manufacturing abroad; the first is that the cost of labour is significantly less in China than it is in say the United Kingdom. The second reason is that regulations and the enforcement of them are significantly lighter in places like China.

In the great Western democracies we built industries and ran them without too much thought for the environment. We dumped coal waste in great slag heaps, which eventually killed children, we poisoned waterways so much so that at one stage the Thames became a lifeless sewer, and we dumped pollution into the air giving our children breathing difficulties and creating cancers.

Even though we knew that unless there is rigorous enforcement of rules to protect the environment, when we exported our industries we were rather careless of what we knew and those receiving our industries were just as careless as us, when they had to run them.

Today, notwithstanding all that we know, the greed is so deep that there are cancer villages in China, created by pollution. There is a correlation between the location of the factories causing pollution and the cancers in the population, so that cancer is now the most popular disease in China having seen it mortality rate rise by 80%.

Beijing suffers from at least as much atmospheric pollution as London did sixty years ago. A great brown cloud is spreading over China.

We may not have known once that pollution damages health, but we do know it now; humanity in its quest for greed and growth has learned that although greed may never be assuaged, growth is just as often malignant as it is benign.

Filed under: climate change Tagged: asian brown cloud, exporting our industry, pollution, smokestack industries

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