Rethink your position on pollution control equipment. From years of first hand experience it's not rocket science. It could be engineered and fabricated on site by anyone who can construct any type of an industrial plant. The biggest obstacle is that technology does have its limits. Some goals are being set, possibly to discourage compliance, that even in the most sophisticated of countries are unrealistic on this planet.
This is not to say that we don't have excellent easy to build and control, pollution control equipment , because we do. If the Federal government or one of these international organizations which we control, wanted to give off the shelf plans to a second or third world country they could---possibly in the way the FDR administration did in the thirties for agriculture and other things. Real simple, this is how you do it type stuff. Of course this would cut some of the hogs away from the trough....
Sincerely, Tom L.
Brad De Long wrote:
> >G'day Brad,
> >
> >You write:
> >
> >>> Go easy on Larry. Remember the papers that he and I wrote late in the 1980s
> >>> supporting a Tobin Tax...
> >
> >I risk going over old terrain here because I've had to resort to trashing
> >unread posts of late. Are we talking Larry Summers?
> >
> >That Larry is, it seems to me, a slightly more forthright and honest pig
> >than the pigs Patrick lists. He knows well enough that of which he's part.
> >As he did in the case of his oh-so-forthright-and-honest argument for
> >poisoning people in the third world. How did that bit of forthright
> >honesty go again? 'They're all gonna die soon anyway, so it won't hurt',
> >wasn't it?
>
> It wasn't, actually...
>
> In a lot of manufacturing industries, "dirty" production processes are a
> lot cheaper than "clean" ones. Since labor productivity in many developing
> economies is still very low, a demand that developing countries adopt
> first-world standards of pollution control may be a demand that they not
> industrialize--that they stay very poor.
>
> It's not clear what the right policy is. It is clear that taking expensive
> steps to reduce the risk of prostate cancer (the reference in your last
> sentence) which kills you a long time from now when you are old should not
> be a high priority as long as you still have amoebic dysentery and cholera
> in your water. And to the extent that industrializing faster in a
> cheap-and-dirty way gets your government the resources to clean up the
> water, industrializing faster is a good thing.
>
> Things are complicated--and this is why it is hard to figure out what the
> right thing to do is--by the fact that the beneficiaries from
> cheap-and-dirty forms of industrialization (the bosses of manufacturing
> firms, and those workers employed in them who aren't whomped by
> pollution-related diseases) are different from those who suffer from
> pollution (children who get lung diseases, and nearby residents poisoned by
> heavy metals). Will the profits from cheap-and-dirty industrialization go
> to cleaning up the public water supply? Or will they go to Swiss bank
> accounts?
>
> As I understand the context of Lant Pritchett's memo, it was written in an
> internal World Bank debate with a whole bunch of guys who were ducking this
> whole set of issues, and simply saying that no factory should be built
> anywhere in the world that does not use best-world-practice emissions
> control methods--and thus had gone overboard on the "Malthusian" side:
> arguing (implicitly at least) that the best policy is to keep people in
> developing economiespoor so they won't pollute very much...
>
> Brad DeLong