美国打算收回部分产业并对中国所谓"制造"(代加工)课以关税.
中国不可能也没有能力报复.
注意我框下的这段:
=======================================================Strange
bedfellows
If you don't believe me, ask the unions.
The United Steelworkers of America and the Sierra Club may seem like strange bedfellows, but they are getting acquainted in a hurry these days. They've already forged a joint working group called the Blue Green Alliance. And while the notion of Archie Bunker getting into bed with Al Gore may still send shivers down the backs of both organized labour and the environmental movement, they had better get used to each other's embrace. A rapidly changing world will see their once diametrically opposing interests suddenly coalesce into a political coalition that will agitate for a cleaner environment while bringing long-lost jobs back to North American shores.
Just as soaring transport costs are a friend to North American labor, so too is carbon pricing. For once in organized labor's history, going green means saving jobs instead of sacrificing them. That's still probably a hard sell at the union halls these days, but like a lot of things in our economy, big change is coming.
Most blue-collar workers don't have warm and fuzzy feelings about environmentalists. And for good reason. Usually, people with comfortable service-sector jobs are the ones who are willing to trade off blue-collar jobs in return for more stringent environmental protection. It's always easy to make green choices at someone else's expense.
But it is also easy to be green when it gives you a leg up on your competition. When unions go through the math, they will come to the realization that in a world where emissions cost money, the factories their members work in have a comparative global advantage. If your emissions are a third less than those of your competitors, you want the price of emissions to be as high as possible - because the bigger the cost of emissions, the greater your cost advantage from emitting less. That's not tree-hugging environmentalism, just plain old profit maximizing economics.
=======================================================
Warming up to carbon tax
JEFF RUBIN, Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller
Published: Saturday, June 13
Tariffs are good for the economy and environment, writes Jeff Rubin in why your world is about to get a whole lot smaller. Here is an excerpt:
Efforts in the developed world to restrict and replace coal-fired capacity seem downright quixotic when juxtaposed against China's (and other developing countries') coal-expansion plans. Whatever reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is achieved in the world's developed economies from switching away from coal will simply be overwhelmed by the increase in emissions from new coal-fired plants in China and the rest of the developing world.
Saving the world is a noble motive for going green. But there is another compelling reason to want a carbon-abatement regime in place as soon as possible. It is called good old-fashioned naked economic self-interest. If we can't agree to save the world for someone else's benefit, we might as well do it for our own.
That's admittedly not the way Washington has seen carbon policy in the past. Far from it. The recent Bush administration always dragged its feet on putting a price on carbon emissions, fearing that the American economy would suffer too much from the resulting increase in energy prices. But the fact of the matter is that the economy has already suffered from the high cost of energy. Just look what is going on in Detroit these days.
Having already paid the economic costs from triple-digit oil prices, why not reap some benefits from your consequent reduction in oil consumption and hence carbon emissions?
Putting a price on carbon emissions when your emissions are falling and your competitors' emissions are soaring is compelling economics. And what's even better, it's economics that can be wrapped in a very green label.
What is the point of shutting down a coal-fired plant at home if another is opening up on the other side of the same planet? The answer to that question takes us back to David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage. Countries should do what they are best at. Just as everyone was better off when Portugal, rather than England, focused on turning grapes and sunlight into wine, the whole planet will be in better shape when the countries that are most efficient in burning carbon get to burn the most. That is where their comparative advantage lies in a world where emitting carbon carries an economic cost.
What the Kyoto Accord failed to recognize is that in a world where greenhouse gas emissions are unevenly controlled, the right to emit suddenly becomes a source of huge comparative economic advantage. Manufacturing will quickly migrate from that part of the world where emissions are controlled (and hence cost money) to that part of the world where emissions are uncontrolled (and cost nothing). In exactly the same way that manufacturing jobs flee high wages and high taxes, they also flee expensive carbon.
In other words, Kyoto turns Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage on its head. Emissions won't migrate to those who can most efficiently manage them but to those who are simply allowed to emit. And they just happen to be the least efficient emitters. It is comparative advantage by decree and one that flies in the face of where true economic comparative advantage really lies. That's why US opposition to the Kyoto Accord wasn't so much about environmental impact as it was about economic impact. Most Americans didn't think Kyoto provided them with a level playing field, and they were right. Their overseas economic competitors wouldn't have had to play by the same carbon rules that the accord would have imposed on American firms. In 1990, the benchmark year for the treaty, 70 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions came from inside the OECD. In 2007, that number was 50 percent.
Numbers like that should tell us that the world has changed and so must Kyoto-type accords if they want to do more than move jobs from advanced to developing countries. It is not a question of moral posturing or assigning blame. North Americans and Australians are responsible for about 20 metric tonnes each per capita, while Britons weigh in at about 10 tonnes each (though the British emit more as a result of air travel than anyone else). The moral high ground is just not available to the world's wealthiest countries.
But as David Ricardo showed nearly two hundred years ago, the developed world does not have to be absolutely cleaner than their competitors to reclaim comparative advantage. They just have to exploit their lead in carbon management - in just the same way that the British exploited their lead in coal use. And the way to do that is by charging a tariff.
It is surely one of the great ironies of the smaller world on the horizon that someone like Ricardo, whose name is often invoked in support of free trade, should furnish us with the idea of charging tariffs on imports, but the world has changed since the days when the items that dominated trade were cloth and wine. Tariffs distort comparative advantage by protecting domestic industries - but a country's energy mix distorts comparative advantage in a similar way. Dirty energy is cheap energy, and therefore a subsidy to the industries that use it. So the carbon tariff is really not a tariff at all. It is a countervailing tariff because it levels the playing field rather than tipping it in favour of the home team.
The most direct strategy for halting the seemingly endless growth in global carbon emissions, is not another round of Kyoto talks calling for voluntary cuts. What we need to do is to impose a carbon cost on emitters at home, then impose the same standards on imports.
As simple as that. It may be expensive to get cleaner, but it is going to be a lot more expensive for our competition. Save the world and beat your trade rivals while doing it - can there be a more satisfying win-win than that?
There is already growing talk in Europe of going this route. Since 2004, Western Europe has imposed economic costs on its own emitters. Today, the right to emit a metric tonne of carbon emissions costs about ?13, or a little over $20, on the European Climate Exchange. Those prices are likely to rise as mandated emission cuts in Euroland become increasingly more severe over time. (Emission credits were only recently trading as high as ?24, or $40 per tonne prior to the 2008 recession.) When a country like France gets 90 percent of its electricity from low-carbon nuclear generators and hydro, it only makes sense for it to work toward a global economy that favors the countries with comparative advantage in carbon management.
As Europe raises its own bar on emissions, there are calls for a carbon tariff on imports from countries like China that don't play by the same carbon rules.
If European manufacturers have to pay to do the right thing, they shouldn't have to pay a second time by giving up competitiveness against trade rivals that underprice them by doing the wrong thing. And what is true in Europe is true in the rest of the developed world, including North America.
In effect, a carbon tariff could affect everything from making steel to manufacturing knock-off Rolexes. The greater the emissions that have gone into producing whatever good is being exported, the higher the tariff that will be charged when that good enters North American or European markets.
A carbon tariff, and the resulting restriction in market access it would bring, may in the end be the only way to get the rest of the world to manage emissions. If China emits greenhouse gases for its own domestic consumption, there is little we can do about it. But if China powers its export industries with carbon-spewing coal-fired generating plants, we can insist that Chinese exporters pay a tariff on those grounds.
As it turns out, China's export industries are a major and growing source of the country's world-leading emissions. Recent estimates suggest that a third of the country's total greenhouse gas emissions come from its export sector. That makes China's export sector alone the second-largest emitter in the world, next only to the total emissions from the US economy.
Meanwhile, if you live in the United States, you will soon be paying two or three times more for your electricity because your state regulator has forced the utility to burn natural gas instead of coal in order to save the environment from ever greater greenhouse gas emissions. What that means at an international level is that you will be subsidizing another country's trade advantage by going greener. That is as bad a deal for your own economy as it is for the global environment.
For that reason, trade policy analysts are going to warm up to the idea of a carbon tariff. But others, including the Chinese, will ask whether that is exactly fair. Didn't we export our own emissions to China when we sent factories overseas and then later imported the very goods that those factories used to produce at home? Can we now penalize China for the emissions that we exported just so we could use their cheap labour to make the things we consume cheaper?
Fair questions. But it does matter where the factories are located, because not all factories are created equal when it comes to carbon emissions. While a factory in China and a factory in the United States emit into the same biosphere, fundamental differences in their energy intensity and in the carbon intensity of the energy they use give rise to very different emission trails.
That's where economics can become very green.
Because the Chinese economy is so carbon intensive, it is about the least optimal place for the world's carbon-intensive industries to call home if carbon emissions carry an economic cost. If, for example, China had the same energy intensity as the US economy and its energy had the same carbon intensity, its emission growth since the beginning of the decade would have been one-fifth the 120 percent increase recorded to date. That in turn would have saved the atmosphere a staggering 2.7 billion metric tonnes in greenhouse gas emissions.
Now that concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide are approaching critical levels, we would love to have those billions of tonnes back. And as time goes by, we will pay more to get them back.
While it is true that the US exported much of its own emissions to China when it exported much of its heavy industry to cheap Chinese labour markets, that shift occurred when greenhouse gas emissions didn't cost anything. Once the market is allowed to put a price on those emissions, that shift may no longer make the same economic sense.
Simply replacing China's manufacturing exports to the States with American production would make a significant dent in global emissions considering that US industry can produce the same manufactured goods for roughly half the carbon emissions. And shifting production to Europe would be even cleaner.
Environmentalists don't get many chances to cut emissions in half with the stroke of a pen. But that is what would eventually happen under a carbon-tariff regime. And in the process, it would bring a lot of long-lost jobs back home.
Strange
bedfellows
If you don't believe me, ask the unions.
The United Steelworkers of America and the Sierra Club may seem like strange bedfellows, but they are getting acquainted in a hurry these days. They've already forged a joint working group called the Blue Green Alliance. And while the notion of Archie Bunker getting into bed with Al Gore may still send shivers down the backs of both organized labour and the environmental movement, they had better get used to each other's embrace. A rapidly changing world will see their once diametrically opposing interests suddenly coalesce into a political coalition that will agitate for a cleaner environment while bringing long-lost jobs back to North American shores.
Just as soaring transport costs are a friend to North American labor, so too is carbon pricing. For once in organized labor's history, going green means saving jobs instead of sacrificing them. That's still probably a hard sell at the union halls these days, but like a lot of things in our economy, big change is coming.
Most blue-collar workers don't have warm and fuzzy feelings about environmentalists. And for good reason. Usually, people with comfortable service-sector jobs are the ones who are willing to trade off blue-collar jobs in return for more stringent environmental protection. It's always easy to make green choices at someone else's expense.
But it is also easy to be green when it gives you a leg up on your competition. When unions go through the math, they will come to the realization that in a world where emissions cost money, the factories their members work in have a comparative global advantage. If your emissions are a third less than those of your competitors, you want the price of emissions to be as high as possible - because the bigger the cost of emissions, the greater your cost advantage from emitting less. That's not tree-hugging environmentalism, just plain old profit maximizing economics.
Excerpted from Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller. Copyright ? 2009 Jeff Rubin. Published by Random House Canada. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
中国不可能也没有能力报复.
注意我框下的这段:
=======================================================Strange
bedfellows
If you don't believe me, ask the unions.
The United Steelworkers of America and the Sierra Club may seem like strange bedfellows, but they are getting acquainted in a hurry these days. They've already forged a joint working group called the Blue Green Alliance. And while the notion of Archie Bunker getting into bed with Al Gore may still send shivers down the backs of both organized labour and the environmental movement, they had better get used to each other's embrace. A rapidly changing world will see their once diametrically opposing interests suddenly coalesce into a political coalition that will agitate for a cleaner environment while bringing long-lost jobs back to North American shores.
Just as soaring transport costs are a friend to North American labor, so too is carbon pricing. For once in organized labor's history, going green means saving jobs instead of sacrificing them. That's still probably a hard sell at the union halls these days, but like a lot of things in our economy, big change is coming.
Most blue-collar workers don't have warm and fuzzy feelings about environmentalists. And for good reason. Usually, people with comfortable service-sector jobs are the ones who are willing to trade off blue-collar jobs in return for more stringent environmental protection. It's always easy to make green choices at someone else's expense.
But it is also easy to be green when it gives you a leg up on your competition. When unions go through the math, they will come to the realization that in a world where emissions cost money, the factories their members work in have a comparative global advantage. If your emissions are a third less than those of your competitors, you want the price of emissions to be as high as possible - because the bigger the cost of emissions, the greater your cost advantage from emitting less. That's not tree-hugging environmentalism, just plain old profit maximizing economics.
=======================================================
Warming up to carbon tax
JEFF RUBIN, Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller
Published: Saturday, June 13
Tariffs are good for the economy and environment, writes Jeff Rubin in why your world is about to get a whole lot smaller. Here is an excerpt:
Efforts in the developed world to restrict and replace coal-fired capacity seem downright quixotic when juxtaposed against China's (and other developing countries') coal-expansion plans. Whatever reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is achieved in the world's developed economies from switching away from coal will simply be overwhelmed by the increase in emissions from new coal-fired plants in China and the rest of the developing world.
Saving the world is a noble motive for going green. But there is another compelling reason to want a carbon-abatement regime in place as soon as possible. It is called good old-fashioned naked economic self-interest. If we can't agree to save the world for someone else's benefit, we might as well do it for our own.
That's admittedly not the way Washington has seen carbon policy in the past. Far from it. The recent Bush administration always dragged its feet on putting a price on carbon emissions, fearing that the American economy would suffer too much from the resulting increase in energy prices. But the fact of the matter is that the economy has already suffered from the high cost of energy. Just look what is going on in Detroit these days.
Having already paid the economic costs from triple-digit oil prices, why not reap some benefits from your consequent reduction in oil consumption and hence carbon emissions?
Putting a price on carbon emissions when your emissions are falling and your competitors' emissions are soaring is compelling economics. And what's even better, it's economics that can be wrapped in a very green label.
What is the point of shutting down a coal-fired plant at home if another is opening up on the other side of the same planet? The answer to that question takes us back to David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage. Countries should do what they are best at. Just as everyone was better off when Portugal, rather than England, focused on turning grapes and sunlight into wine, the whole planet will be in better shape when the countries that are most efficient in burning carbon get to burn the most. That is where their comparative advantage lies in a world where emitting carbon carries an economic cost.
What the Kyoto Accord failed to recognize is that in a world where greenhouse gas emissions are unevenly controlled, the right to emit suddenly becomes a source of huge comparative economic advantage. Manufacturing will quickly migrate from that part of the world where emissions are controlled (and hence cost money) to that part of the world where emissions are uncontrolled (and cost nothing). In exactly the same way that manufacturing jobs flee high wages and high taxes, they also flee expensive carbon.
In other words, Kyoto turns Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage on its head. Emissions won't migrate to those who can most efficiently manage them but to those who are simply allowed to emit. And they just happen to be the least efficient emitters. It is comparative advantage by decree and one that flies in the face of where true economic comparative advantage really lies. That's why US opposition to the Kyoto Accord wasn't so much about environmental impact as it was about economic impact. Most Americans didn't think Kyoto provided them with a level playing field, and they were right. Their overseas economic competitors wouldn't have had to play by the same carbon rules that the accord would have imposed on American firms. In 1990, the benchmark year for the treaty, 70 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions came from inside the OECD. In 2007, that number was 50 percent.
Numbers like that should tell us that the world has changed and so must Kyoto-type accords if they want to do more than move jobs from advanced to developing countries. It is not a question of moral posturing or assigning blame. North Americans and Australians are responsible for about 20 metric tonnes each per capita, while Britons weigh in at about 10 tonnes each (though the British emit more as a result of air travel than anyone else). The moral high ground is just not available to the world's wealthiest countries.
But as David Ricardo showed nearly two hundred years ago, the developed world does not have to be absolutely cleaner than their competitors to reclaim comparative advantage. They just have to exploit their lead in carbon management - in just the same way that the British exploited their lead in coal use. And the way to do that is by charging a tariff.
It is surely one of the great ironies of the smaller world on the horizon that someone like Ricardo, whose name is often invoked in support of free trade, should furnish us with the idea of charging tariffs on imports, but the world has changed since the days when the items that dominated trade were cloth and wine. Tariffs distort comparative advantage by protecting domestic industries - but a country's energy mix distorts comparative advantage in a similar way. Dirty energy is cheap energy, and therefore a subsidy to the industries that use it. So the carbon tariff is really not a tariff at all. It is a countervailing tariff because it levels the playing field rather than tipping it in favour of the home team.
The most direct strategy for halting the seemingly endless growth in global carbon emissions, is not another round of Kyoto talks calling for voluntary cuts. What we need to do is to impose a carbon cost on emitters at home, then impose the same standards on imports.
As simple as that. It may be expensive to get cleaner, but it is going to be a lot more expensive for our competition. Save the world and beat your trade rivals while doing it - can there be a more satisfying win-win than that?
There is already growing talk in Europe of going this route. Since 2004, Western Europe has imposed economic costs on its own emitters. Today, the right to emit a metric tonne of carbon emissions costs about ?13, or a little over $20, on the European Climate Exchange. Those prices are likely to rise as mandated emission cuts in Euroland become increasingly more severe over time. (Emission credits were only recently trading as high as ?24, or $40 per tonne prior to the 2008 recession.) When a country like France gets 90 percent of its electricity from low-carbon nuclear generators and hydro, it only makes sense for it to work toward a global economy that favors the countries with comparative advantage in carbon management.
As Europe raises its own bar on emissions, there are calls for a carbon tariff on imports from countries like China that don't play by the same carbon rules.
If European manufacturers have to pay to do the right thing, they shouldn't have to pay a second time by giving up competitiveness against trade rivals that underprice them by doing the wrong thing. And what is true in Europe is true in the rest of the developed world, including North America.
In effect, a carbon tariff could affect everything from making steel to manufacturing knock-off Rolexes. The greater the emissions that have gone into producing whatever good is being exported, the higher the tariff that will be charged when that good enters North American or European markets.
A carbon tariff, and the resulting restriction in market access it would bring, may in the end be the only way to get the rest of the world to manage emissions. If China emits greenhouse gases for its own domestic consumption, there is little we can do about it. But if China powers its export industries with carbon-spewing coal-fired generating plants, we can insist that Chinese exporters pay a tariff on those grounds.
As it turns out, China's export industries are a major and growing source of the country's world-leading emissions. Recent estimates suggest that a third of the country's total greenhouse gas emissions come from its export sector. That makes China's export sector alone the second-largest emitter in the world, next only to the total emissions from the US economy.
Meanwhile, if you live in the United States, you will soon be paying two or three times more for your electricity because your state regulator has forced the utility to burn natural gas instead of coal in order to save the environment from ever greater greenhouse gas emissions. What that means at an international level is that you will be subsidizing another country's trade advantage by going greener. That is as bad a deal for your own economy as it is for the global environment.
For that reason, trade policy analysts are going to warm up to the idea of a carbon tariff. But others, including the Chinese, will ask whether that is exactly fair. Didn't we export our own emissions to China when we sent factories overseas and then later imported the very goods that those factories used to produce at home? Can we now penalize China for the emissions that we exported just so we could use their cheap labour to make the things we consume cheaper?
Fair questions. But it does matter where the factories are located, because not all factories are created equal when it comes to carbon emissions. While a factory in China and a factory in the United States emit into the same biosphere, fundamental differences in their energy intensity and in the carbon intensity of the energy they use give rise to very different emission trails.
That's where economics can become very green.
Because the Chinese economy is so carbon intensive, it is about the least optimal place for the world's carbon-intensive industries to call home if carbon emissions carry an economic cost. If, for example, China had the same energy intensity as the US economy and its energy had the same carbon intensity, its emission growth since the beginning of the decade would have been one-fifth the 120 percent increase recorded to date. That in turn would have saved the atmosphere a staggering 2.7 billion metric tonnes in greenhouse gas emissions.
Now that concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide are approaching critical levels, we would love to have those billions of tonnes back. And as time goes by, we will pay more to get them back.
While it is true that the US exported much of its own emissions to China when it exported much of its heavy industry to cheap Chinese labour markets, that shift occurred when greenhouse gas emissions didn't cost anything. Once the market is allowed to put a price on those emissions, that shift may no longer make the same economic sense.
Simply replacing China's manufacturing exports to the States with American production would make a significant dent in global emissions considering that US industry can produce the same manufactured goods for roughly half the carbon emissions. And shifting production to Europe would be even cleaner.
Environmentalists don't get many chances to cut emissions in half with the stroke of a pen. But that is what would eventually happen under a carbon-tariff regime. And in the process, it would bring a lot of long-lost jobs back home.
Strange
bedfellows
If you don't believe me, ask the unions.
The United Steelworkers of America and the Sierra Club may seem like strange bedfellows, but they are getting acquainted in a hurry these days. They've already forged a joint working group called the Blue Green Alliance. And while the notion of Archie Bunker getting into bed with Al Gore may still send shivers down the backs of both organized labour and the environmental movement, they had better get used to each other's embrace. A rapidly changing world will see their once diametrically opposing interests suddenly coalesce into a political coalition that will agitate for a cleaner environment while bringing long-lost jobs back to North American shores.
Just as soaring transport costs are a friend to North American labor, so too is carbon pricing. For once in organized labor's history, going green means saving jobs instead of sacrificing them. That's still probably a hard sell at the union halls these days, but like a lot of things in our economy, big change is coming.
Most blue-collar workers don't have warm and fuzzy feelings about environmentalists. And for good reason. Usually, people with comfortable service-sector jobs are the ones who are willing to trade off blue-collar jobs in return for more stringent environmental protection. It's always easy to make green choices at someone else's expense.
But it is also easy to be green when it gives you a leg up on your competition. When unions go through the math, they will come to the realization that in a world where emissions cost money, the factories their members work in have a comparative global advantage. If your emissions are a third less than those of your competitors, you want the price of emissions to be as high as possible - because the bigger the cost of emissions, the greater your cost advantage from emitting less. That's not tree-hugging environmentalism, just plain old profit maximizing economics.
Excerpted from Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller. Copyright ? 2009 Jeff Rubin. Published by Random House Canada. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
