If anything is going to slow China down, it’s going to be shit like this. I was reading somewhere a few weeks back about execs not wanting to live in Hong Kong, for fear of what the air blown from upwind industrial facilities is doing to their kids. The Chinese will have to clean up enough so that their upper-middle classes have a nice patch with sunshine in which they can live. For the Chinese, that will prove a lot of work.

I hope, after we’ve thrown out the “policymakers” who can’t seem to formulate more than iterations of the same tired ideology, we install leaders who understand 1) in our National Debt, we have a serious financial obligation to meet, including a great deal to China 2) we still have a lot of fairly decent underused industrial capacity laying around, and it wouldn’t be that hard to retool it to produce the stuff China will need to clean up. Cause I promise you much of Chinese industry has exactly no industrial capacity or R&D devoted to environmental protection and industrial conservation technology. Selling that stuff back to the emerging markets of the world would give us some financial breathing space, pun intended, such that we might use the flow of capital to also develop industrial technologies that didn’t require destroying the environment. Which, you know, eventually we’re going to have to do.

Intelligent versions of some of what I think can be found here, where I always seem to be stealing ideas.