This idea is one that has me slightly less pessimistic about the chances of the world actually doing something about climate change. We don't have to have 195 countries agreeing to a plan and have huge advantages accrue to cheaters who don't follow the plan. We can start with a small but significant number and it's the cheaters that lose out.
Additionally it just simply makes sense since anecdotally we are aware that many chinese live in extremely rural situations with no heating/cooling, or live in dense buildings with shared resources.
These things cost money, and the median Chinese consumer does not have the budget for these items.
The environment knows nothing about "China" or "USA" either, these are just arbitrary groupings of people. You can compare the whole of the USA with arbitrary subsets of China, and find that the USA is the biggest polluter in absolute terms. Of course it's as pointless as comparing the whole of China with the whole of US, what counts is the per capita emissions. Qed.
If you pee in the river once a month, but the municipality of the town upstream decides to release its entire sewage into it, does the river calculate the impact per-capita?
Environmental protections would have been a much more justifiable motivation for attempting to modify the behavior of Chinese exporters and even the playing field for US competitors who must comply with environmental regs that Chinese firms can ignore.
But Trump's goal with the tariffs was simply to destroy economic cooperation between the US and China, so that peaceful business entanglements would be less able to prevent escalation toward war.
This is a genius tactical move. It gives them a claim to the moral high ground and splits off Europe as an ally.
This move is also available to Trump, but there's no way he'd ever take it.
It'd also be a genius tactic to adopt by the Democratic presidential candidate's. Trump's trade war is quite popular with the American public; the presidential candidates could be hurt quite badly by opposing it directly.
> “While Trump plays a game of chicken on tariffs, a record number of Americans believe that free trade is good,” says Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt at Hart Research Associates.
Horwitt is spinning his poll to make it seem like free trade is not what the trade war will result in. A majority of Americans support Trump. Don't make the 2016 mistake of trusting polls again...
>Horwitt is spinning his poll to make it seem like free trade is not what the trade war will result in.
And you're spinning it as 2/3rds supporting Trump's tariffs. Which is not the poll's question.
>A majority of Americans support Trump
What has this got to do with anything, even if true? Which it is not, see below.
>Don't make the 2016 mistake of trusting polls again...
What 2016 mistake? 2 million more voted against Trump than votd for him. He won because the electoral college is effective gerrymandered because of demographic changes. So you have zero basis to state that a majority of Americans support Trump for now.
I mean, you're the one quoting a poll, and saying it shows that 2/3rds support Trump's tariffs.
Which is wrong on two levels, first, that's not even what the poll shows, second, even if it did, if you're right about polls being wrong, then the poll is useless to measure public sentiment.
Also, you cannot just make up things without telling us how you arrived at those assertions.
The trade war specifically is not addressed in the poll; “free trade” is, and it has broad support. Free trade is directly the opposite of a tariff policy, so superficially that's directly contrary to your characterization. While you could argue that the policy is designed to produce an outcome which would feature free trade as a future state, there's nothing in the poll that suggests that the public supports that position. So, no, while there is a potential argument that your source doesn't directly contradict the point you cite it for, it absolutely does not support that point even a little bit.
That also doesn't show that the American public broadly supports the trade war, it shows that a particular demographic that broadly supported Trump before the trade war broadly also supports the trade war, just a little less than it still supports Trump (78% vs. 79%.)
If that holds for other groups (trade war support just below Trump support) it would indicate America broadly opposes the trade war, as Trump's at <45% support in current polling.
If Trump had more than a five second attention span we’d have the Border Adjustment Tax right now and be done with it. Maybe make it carbon based later.
This idea is one that has me slightly less pessimistic about the chances of the world actually doing something about climate change. We don't have to have 195 countries agreeing to a plan and have huge advantages accrue to cheaters who don't follow the plan. We can start with a small but significant number and it's the cheaters that lose out.