Every hindrance on industry made in the name of the Earth is a lie if it does not include similar restrictions on imports from countries without laws like ours.
Bashing America is popular on the radical left, but it betrays just how much they really don’t know about the rest of the world. For leftists concerned about the environment, incessantly focusing on the United States is an especially big mental failure. While American stewardship of our land, water, and air have gradually improved over the last 50 years, real degradation of the natural environment has been increasing overseas.
Politicians on the left preach piously about the need to protect the Earth while decrying any sort of restriction on trade with the world’s greatest polluter, China. Anyone who cares about good stewardship of the Earth should consider that trade with China is the United States’ most anti-environmental activity. If you want to be green, you must call for tariffs on China.
Communism’s Anti-Environmental Legacy
China is by far the world’s biggest user of coal, and unlike the west, they make little attempt to clean up the byproducts. They burned more coal than ever in 2020 and so far in 2021, they are on pace to use even more. Pollution in their major cities, where mask-wearing was a thing long before anyone heard of COVID-19, is telling.
Their uncaring attitude even extends to space, like earlier this year when bits of a Chinese rocket were left to fall wherever they might. Even when China pretends to be green, the efforts are an obvious sham. The Chinese Communist Party cares as little for the Earth as they do its inhabitants.
The exact statistics from Beijing cannot be fully trusted, but their environmental record is in line with other Marxist regimes. As China does, the Soviet Union put a premium on rapid industrialization. While an advanced economy offers a better standard of living, the Soviets allowed a possibly worthy end to justify a host of atrocious means. In addition to executions, gulags, and famines, they also wrecked the environment, leaving behind a legacy of pollution Russia is still battling today.
China’s actions are similar. In their drive to rival the United States in economic output and industrial strength, they have committed atrocities against their own people and against the world. Mao Tse-Tung’s Great Leap Forward and its “backyard furnace” program are well-known examples. Instructing every communal farm to build a furnace to increase steel production, the CCP mainly succeeded in forcing farmers with no knowledge of steelmaking to melt down their iron and fuel forges by cutting down trees, only to result in inferior steel of no use to anyone.
China, Not the U.S., Needs Environmental Reform
The modern CCP is more sophisticated. They make products that, if not the highest quality, are good enough for mass export. By ignoring environmental concerns (and workplace safety concerns, labor law concerns, human rights concerns, etc.) they can produce a product so cheap the price overrides people’s other doubts.
Sacrificing people and resources for material gains is nothing new for a Marxist state, but our reaction to it is. In America, politicians on the left talk of the environment in increasingly apocalyptic terms. Climate change is a priority for very few voters, but the sky-is-falling rhetoric from their representatives would make you think nothing is of greater importance.
