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More Evidence Identifies China as The Source of Mysterious Ozone-Destroying Emissions
For years, a mystery puzzled environmental scientists. The world had banned the use of many ozone-depleting compounds in 2010. So why were global emission levels [DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0106-2] [DX] still so high?
The picture started to clear up in June. That's when The New York Times published an investigation into the issue. China, the paper claimed, was to blame for these mystery emissions. Now it turns out the paper was probably right to point a finger.
In a paper [open, DOI: 10.1029/2018GL079500] [DX] published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, an international team of researchers confirms that eastern China is the source of at least half of the 40,000 tonnes of carbon tetrachloride emissions currently entering the atmosphere each year. They figured this out using a combination of ground-based and airborne atmospheric concentration data from near the Korean peninsula.
Previously: Someone, Somewhere, is Making a Banned Chemical that Destroys the Ozone Layer
Illegal Chinese Refrigerator Factories Are Selling Banned CFCs
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 30 2018, @01:58AM
Let me repeat: there is no such thing as simple tariffs - tariffs are penalties, taxes, things to be ducked and avoided by all means possible, legal, illegal, and infinitely creative. Those who impose tariffs invite the taxed to make fools of them.
On the flip side: incentives are sought by people and given by the authorities. One may attempt to defraud the authorities to obtain incentives not deserved, but if the rules of incentive are simple enough, that should be easily audited and corrected when abused. When one offers incentives, those incentivized seek them out and willingly provide information about and insight into the acts being incentivised, obfuscation and subterfuge are ineffective at cheating incentives.
Nothing about that is simple. If you turn this dynamic, easily defrauded adjustable rate scheme on its head as an incentive, then you put the onus of researching and documenting the appropriate incentive rates onto those seeking the incentive, instead of attempting to use the tariff income to finance a department of (easily fooled, defrauded and bribed) auditors. If you, as a domestic businessman feel that you should be incentivized to compete with country X making widget Y, then you show how your costs of materials and labor are necessarily higher domestically and how much the government should pay you for making widget Y using domestically sourced materials and labor. If you make a good case, then you get the incentive and should be able to market widget Y at a competitive price with those produced in X - much like food production is subsidized in the US today.
A version of this already goes on with minority and female owned businesses bidding for government contracts, how about instead of just directing benefits at token minority figurehead company owners we start directing the benefits toward businesses who demonstrate (prove) that they are paying competitive wages to their workers and direct these benefits toward those workers? Why not? Look at the U.S.' currently elected leadership and tell me if "benefits to the workers" seems remotely plausible as an actual delivered legislative change.
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