
Study Pinpoints Source of Banned Gas That Saps Ozone Layer: Eastern China - pulisse
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/climate/china-cfcs-banned-chemicals-ozone.html
======
docker_up
I mean, let's be honest here: is this really a surprise?

There's a business culture of dishonesty throughout the country that is
unprecedented. Their food supply is poisoned by factories that simply don't
care about life and only care about money. There have been articles about how
cooking oil is recycled from waste, and how fish are fed feces instead of food
and packed in ice from polluted waters. Fake milk, fake baby formula, fake
eggs for crying out loud. They add poisonous chemicals to pass tests, but
those chemicals killed hundreds of pets in the US. And when the FBI went to
investigate, the factory has already been burned to the ground to eliminate
evidence. My friend worked at Uber and she said that the amount of fraud
perpetrated within China was staggering, more than any other country on a per
capita basis.

There was an article on HN recently talking about how some Chinese products on
Amazon have 40x the safe amount of lead and 30x the safe amount of cadmium in
children's products. How does lead and cadmium get into a Spider-man pencil
case for fuck's sake?

It's so bad that even Chinese citizens simply don't trust the products made in
China. When Chinese citizens go abroad they buy things like baby formula
because they know they can't trust Chinese baby formula. It's sickening. I'm
teaching my children to completely stay away from cheap Chinese products
because we seriously have no way to know if it's safe, and our government has
cut funding time and time again so it doesn't have enough resources to test
the goods coming in.

It's reprehensible.

~~~
firethief
America has the same business culture; what's saving (most of) us is our
better-functioning regulatory culture.

~~~
ars
> America has the same business culture; what's saving (most of) us is our
> better-functioning regulatory culture.

The difference in America is it's not good business practice to hurt your own
customers. i.e. reputation matters. You mess up just once, and it takes years
for your brand to recover (this includes non-brand brands, like store brands
or generics).

In China it seems like there's a never ending supply of new names constantly.

~~~
ppseafield
Sometimes the backlash can be catastrophic in China though.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal)

------
mrnobody_67
We also know the source of the plastic in the ocean... turns out it boils down
to a very small number of rivers, in a very specific region of the world.
[https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-
polluti...](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluting-
our-oceans-comes-from-just-10-rivers/)

~~~
tty2300
Likely to change soon. Those areas have stopped buying plastic waste from the
rest of the world.

~~~
sephamorr
Having seen the trash coming down several of these rivers in person,
everything I could identify seemed to be of local origin. I certainly didn't
see non-local languages written on plastic bottles, for example.

~~~
internet_user
It's just fashionable to blame everything on the West.

The East isn't any different.

------
tozeur
Having been an expat traveled to over 25 countries, I can confidently say our
natural world is fucked. Modern industrialism has given the third world too
much manufacturing power. And they aren’t aware of the consequences and don’t
care, because “fuckit I want kids toys and double ply toilet paper for my
family too, not just the Westerners”

~~~
BurningFrog
All currently rich "sophisticated" countries were in a similar phase when they
were fighting their way out of poverty.

Once countries get rich enough, they can afford to care about the environment.
China seems to advance much faster than others did historically, so I'm
hopeful.

~~~
whiddershins
We also assumed as countries became more rich/industrialized/advanced they
would become more democratic, and more concerned with human rights, and less
zero-sum adversarial in dealing with the United States.

I think those hopes are no longer mainstream thinking in regards to China.

How confident should we be about the prediction that China will adopt similar
policies to the US in regards to the things you are mentioning?

~~~
Joakal
USA democratic system is one step away from China's one party system: it's a
two party system in USA which hasn't changed much for centuries.

Europe, Australia, etc, have more than two parties in government. More choice,
more representation.

~~~
seagullz
“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has
two right wings: Republican and Democrat.”

― Gore Vidal

------
internet_user
Should they be under international sanctions for polluting our commons and
destrying the planet?

~~~
llukas
Simpler is to return production to countries that have proper environmental
regulations. Right now we outsource pollution production to China.

~~~
internet_user
Really, moving a supplychain is easier than punitive tariffs/sanctions?

~~~
kbenson
Requiring companies to not do business in countries (or use specific
industries in those countries) based on some specific goal _is_ a form of
sanctions.

------
wtdata
Sincerely, all this environmentalist's manifestations we are seeing in EU,
would actually make sense if they where in front of the Chinese embassies
here.

Instead they keep demanding local actions from the EU, as if the EU hasn't
been in the forefront of environmental protection for almost half a century
now. This way they are just diverting the attention away from the real main
issue: China.

------
wyxuan
Tragedy of the commons. If there is a shared resource, let the people act in
their self interest and sap away all of it.

------
stevespang
Not only banned flourocarbons, China and Asia are the main source of plastics
entering the oceans through their rivers.

Some are calling for environmental mercenaries, like Earth First! or
GreenPeace, who will reek havoc on those who pollute or endanger the planet,
ourselves included.

~~~
bArray
As much as I hate to see the environment getting destroyed, eco-terrorism is
not the way forwards.

Every normal person is empowered to help: purchase from people whose ideals
you agree with, win the hearts and minds of those around you, re-use
everything you safely can.

~~~
slowmovintarget
And perhaps there should be tariffs on Chinese goods to prevent them from
dumping poisonous products on the market.

Some of these things like lead and cadmium in children's pencil cases made me
wonder if this was intentional.

~~~
umvi
> And perhaps there should be tariffs on Chinese goods

Someone other than Trump will have to do it though, otherwise the motives are
all wrong

~~~
Fjolsvith
If the results are positive, the motives won't matter.

------
heybrendan
TFA made me think of Dr. Mehmet Oz' interview of Dr. Jordan Peterson [1] from
last year (2018). I've transcribed part of the interview below:

Dr. Jordan Peterson:

> "I've always been obsessed with totalitarianism and authoritarian
> governments whether they're on the Right or the Left for years--decades
> really. I spent almost all of my free time thinking about what happened in
> Nazi Germany and in Russia during the Soviet era; but also when Mao was [in]
> China--there were other places as well. [I was] trying to understand how it
> was that we could have got off the rails so absolutely terribly. I started
> studying that at the collectivist level, looking for political or economic
> reasons. But as I investigated further those levels of analysis [...]
> weren't providing the answers that I wanted--I think partly because I was
> really interested in the notion that there's something to learn from what
> happened, say in Nazi Germany: but there's something to learn at an
> individual level. That's my estimation. I don't think that there were
> innocent masses of people led astray by a single malevolent leader. I don't
> think the fundamental motivations for what happened in Nazi Germany were
> economic and I don't think they were in the Soviet Union either. As I read
> more and more about the situation, I realized that the proclivity of
> individuals to avoid responsibility and to lie, especially about their own
> lives and about their own experience, were really the reasons that those
> systems went so far astray."

> "[...] The lessons there for me were psychological and that taught me an
> awful lot about the role of the individual: people like Viktor Frankl, for
> example, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, a perennial classic and a great
> book--insisted that a large part of the reason that Germany went off the
> rails so badly was because individual Germans were so willing to falsify
> their own experience. Alexander Solzhenitsyn who wrote the Gulag
> Archipelago, the best document on what happened in the Soviet Union, also
> made exactly the same argument."

> "So I got interested in the psychological causes of catastrophic governance
> and that taught me a lot. It taught me about responsibility. About the
> responsibility of the sovereign individual. We have an idea in our [Western]
> culture, it's a very powerful idea: that each of us is of intrinsic value.
> But associated with that value is a responsibility: we have a responsibility
> for our own integrity and for that of our families but also of the state."

This begs the question: are Chinese business men and women willing to falsify
their own experience at the expense of the {environment,personal integrity} to
make a buck and/or survive?

The business culture of dishonesty (borrowing from HN user docker_up) can't
persist forever.

[1] [https://youtu.be/AscPHmLWo-M?t=322](https://youtu.be/AscPHmLWo-M?t=322)

~~~
frequentnapper
This quote reeks of self-righteousness. Western corporations have done as much
harm as they could get away with to make a quick buck as well.

Jordan Peterson is an individual who seems like he struggled to make sense of
the world according to his Christian/Pure-Capitalistic view of the world and
decided to concoct wild self-righteous theories to justify his bias rather
than change his viewpoint. The only thing he has going for him is that he
speaks with extreme confidence. My advide to you: choose a better messiah to
save you from whatever disillusionment you are going through.

~~~
reallydude
> decided to concoct wild self-righteous theories to justify his bias rather
> than change his viewpoint

To what? Is there a "right" answer that would serve someone better? It's
always going to appear self-righteous when you justify your own worldview. The
utility of JP's views, is why other people adopt it, not some fictional
"messianic cult". JP's reasoning has flaws and gaps as with all people. Even
the utility is from other historical wisdom, not his own, repackaged into a
story. Easily digestable and as rational as any other I have seen.

~~~
andrekandre
> Even the utility is from other historical wisdom, not his own, repackaged
> into a story. Easily digestable and as rational as any other I have seen.

but that doesn’t necessarily make them true

~~~
reallydude
What does "true" mean in this context? A belief system isn't true in any
sense, nor is it practical to have a full knowledge of reality (enough to have
rigid axioms about human behavior), so what's the goalpost here?

