Tradeoff Between Environment and Economy is "Nonsense" Says GE Executive : TreeHugger

I remember Bush saying something to the effect of you have to have policies that make companies want to do business here and then we'll stop losing jobs to off-shoring.

And as usual Bush had it backward. Companies already want to do business here. We are now getting close to losing our status as the largest market in the world. That alone is why companies want to do business here.

The problem with off-shoring is the false belief that allowing pollution in another country does not pollute us here. So our policies are to send polluting industries out of our borders and pollute within the borders of other countries to get the goods we desire. The problem is pollution does not recognize political borders. So the pollution generated there finds its way here anyway.

The way I look at it, we are stuck in a post WW@ trade mentality. In the immediate aftermath of WW2 we were the only standing economy left. Every one else was destroyed by the ravishes of war. So we developed a trade policy that discriminated slightly against domestic industries in order to build up the economic bases of these other countries. This was good for us for a couple of decades, too, because it helped revive our trading partners. The problem is we are still functioning under this same policy. We still discriminate against domestic companies compared to foreign ones.

This discrimination needs to end. Foreign companies have to be held to the same standards that we hold domestic companies to. This is legal according to international law, because international law only forbids discrimination against foreign based companies. It does not forbid holding them to the same standards. Now we can only do this for those goods and services that are bought and sold in our markets. We can't tell a foreign company how they have to behave in dealing with markets in other countries. But since we are such a large market, we have a large impact on behavior of any business.

By holding foreign companies to our regulations, this unfair advantage they have over domestic companies disappears and we compete on equal footing. Many of the jobs that left will come back because the economic advantages of increased pollution and other regulatory compliance issues will disappear. Then we get into real economic differences like shipping costs, cost of living differences, skill set differences, etc. The factors that make fair and open trade advantageous to everyone.