"Good for the American workers" appears to be a dead concern to US-based corporations: if they can squeeze an extra half million by using slave labor in India or Singapore, they will move production in a heartbeat and tighten their grip further until they end up with an additional hundred thou.

Yeah, who wants those countries with smog and air pollution to have low sulfur/cleaner coal. It's not like what they do in china ever effects our environment here in the U S of A. Cough.

It's a complicated issue. One thing is sure: keeping US coal out of China will drastically worsen, not improve, Chinese air pollution, because they will be forced to use other, much dirtier sources. Good for our air, though, unless you're on the West Coast. Wait a minute.... Also, any argument about "undercutting American manufacturers" is a load of bullshit. They're not coming back to the US no matter what happens. They're going to further low-wage countries, like Thailand and Malaysia, and there isn't anything American manufacturers or anyone else can do about it.

Shhh, just continue Doe Bay-ing or whatever it is that happens up on that island.

I find it really depressing that a command economy like China can't command up some cleaner energy sources. It's one thing for our capitalistic society to drag its ass on renewables. What's China's excuse?

@6,

Hot tubbing.

the excuse is that alt energy isn't as cost-effective as fossil fuels, and that the most cost-effective forms might not really be very green, anyway. capital is cheap and energy largely expensive and unstable. that suggests we're not going to get replacements from the supply side, and that the most successful adjustments will be reductions of demand for fossil fuels, especially where it sends prices below extraction costs. these adjustments will shrink the economy, and the way to mitigate the resulting unemployment and its consequences is the mass employment of humans in face2face service of other humans, as in wars on soft targets like ignorance, type2 diabetes and child neglect

Fnarf because of rising Chinese wages and shitty infrastructure / political uncertainty elsewhere in E/SE/S.Asia, there is more space for US manufacturing at the margins. the US is an enormous manufacturer anyway, just not as important relative to the rest of the world as US was before. reductions in US comparative advantage re: energy prices would certainly tell at the margins of US manufacturing