Environmental Tax Breaks to Developing Nations

Our Missionary to the Frozen Wastelands has written an outstanding post on China's efforts to avoid restrictions on their CO2 emissions. Here's a tidbit. Read the whole thing.

China argues that as a developing nation, it does not have the financial resources to shift to cleaner, i.e more expensive, technology and therefore should be exempt from any emissions limits.

Globalization has given companies access to manufacturing all over the world. Environmental regulations place a huge economic burden on companies whose plants are in the US. If a similar workforce can be had in another nation where the environmental (or labor) regulations aren't so restrictive, what do you think will happen? Won't jobs be moved overseas where the local environment can be trashed and profits can be made?

If you didn't do this, but your competitors did, how long do you think you'd survive?

This is exactly what China and other developing nations are asking for. They want us to sign global warming treaties, but give themselves an out. This will force American companies to move manufacturing jobs into their countries. The leader of those countries will practice the same graft, corruption and idiotic economic policies that have kept them "developing nations" and their population will have jobs and stay quiet and busy.

Nowhere in these treaties is there any incentive for China or the rest to become anything other than "developing nations." In fact, the moment they declare themselves developed, they're screwed. They will then have to live up to the environmental regulations and their jobs will be exported to countries that are still "developing."

China is a corrupt, communist dictatorship. The people who sign the treaties in China are the ones siphoning the money off of the state industries and taking kickbacks from the semi-private ones, if not owning them outright. Why in the world would they ever progress if their lack of progress is what brings the money to them in the first place?

Making a virtue out of economic failure and rewarding it with ecologically destructive industries doesn't seem to make sense to me.