opinion

This is the price for a dollar increase in businesses bottom line.

This is us if the regressives get their way, even though 98.5% of scientist say that part of global warming is from people ,regressive keep on saying that it is a climate cycle,

crychang - "You would think the Sierra Club could leave us alone and go after a real smoking gun." --- That reminds me, thank you also to the Sierra Club and like-minded organizations for helping keep America from turning into the smog-choked mess that China is today.

When I was in China in 1990, Beijing was already somewhat polluted from coal dust, but the skies were clear otherwise. Most people got around on bicycles, and it was easy in that flat, dry landscape. A few years later, I read that the Chinese government was encouraging people to buy cars, building freeways, and actually banning bicycles from certain streets. "Oh-oh," I thought. The TV images from the 2008 Olympics showed a city so different from what I saw in 1990 that it hardly seemed to belong in the same country. It was monumentally stupid of the Chinese government to encourage car ownership.

You would think the Sierra Club could leave us alone and go after a real smoking gun.

ranger78:"China is not choking on economic success. They are choking on Communism's utter disregard for people and the environment."==China has been Communist in name only for a long time. The government is repressive, true, but you don't have to be Communist to be repressive. No Communist country ever had private citizens owning large industrial conglomerates, encouraged Western sweatshops, charged tuition for K-12 schooling, or entirely lacked a social safety net.

I think it's long past time that we consider all the costs of an enterprise before we decide whether or not it is a success. China's growth-at-all-costs approach can hardly be considered a success if the people can't breathe, or take bathroom breaks, or have clean water. Success at what price?

Putting tetra-ethylated lead in gasoline was vastly more profitable for oil companies than using ethanol (which can't be patented), but we're still learning the costs of saturating our country in lead byproduct. That risk was known at the time, and the companies that did it should have been held liable for the costs to clean it up. Current extraction industries should be forced to pay for the costs they pass onto the rest of us in the form of polluted water and air. We have to deal with it and pay for it. The residents of Japan, and with atmospheric and oceanic currents, the rest of us, have to deal with the fallout from Fukushima, which is far worse than we've been told so far.

When one balances the costs and benefits of what China has done, it's hard to call it an unqualified success.

"China is not choking on economic success. They are choking on Communism's utter disregard for people and the environment." Please explain how China would be experiencing these massive ecological problems without tremendous economic growth, ranger. I mean, the pollution has to come from something, you know, and ever increasing amounts of pollution can only mean huge industrial growth. This country has already been there, done that, but has the "me, me, me" generation learned from our own history?

"China is not choking on economic success. They are choking on Communism's utter disregard for people and the environment." Like North Dakota? Well, it IS a red state, too.

air pollution knows no borders-same with water tell Walmart's VP of Ethical Sourcing that please