Global warming is becoming a major concern of business leaders, families, politicians and just about everyone else. The remarkable growth in world population and national economies has fed into the environment lots of toxic gases that are beginning to change the environment in which we live. This environment is beginning to cause serious climatic changes.
Corporations have a responsibility to clean the environment after they have damaged it. They also have a responsibility to ensure that they are not damaging their operations while they continuing on with their operations. The problem is that American and European companies are being held to a different standard than companies of other nations.
Dupont was ordered this week to pay 196 million dollars to clean up property at its old facilities in West Virginia. According to prosecutors the company had dumped heavy metals into the environment, which is causing not only health problems for local residents but also contaminating the soil around the plant and area. It is doubtful that the same would happen in many other nations.
Companies in other countries like China and the Asiatic areas would not be required to pay such damages and engage in such rigorous clean up activities. Their health and safety standards are lower then in most European nations and their labor costs are much lower as well. To add to their advantage we can also say that governments support these businesses with lower tax rates giving them many advantages the European and American’s are having a hard time dealing with.
This doesn’t mean that European nations should relax restrictions on environmental damage in their areas but that they should hold Asian countries more responsible for their own environments. The pollution in America and China will likely have a reciprocal affect on the entire world environment and such pollution doesn’t stay local. Therefore new international standards should be formed and dealt with.
People may then wonder, “How would countries like the U.S. control the environments of China?” They do so by adding environmental import tax on all products that come from these environmentally hazardous societies. This import tax will calculate the cost of environmental problems and add it to the product that will make American products more desirable.
America is the world’s largest importer and has control of a lot of markets. We have been pushing to get into China so we have learned to play “hard ball” because the majority of our manufactured goods are more expensive. Therefore, each time we open an opportunity for our products more Chinese products flood our markets. It is like a person trying to canoe up stream.
Both politicians and businesses are becoming concerned with the environment. A group of around 25 major corporations solicited president Bush to raise the pollution standards in fear that a major environmental collapse could happen in the next two decades. The Bush Administration made brief comments about the topic but didn’t seem overly concerned. When businesses begin to recognize the danger and are willing to pay for it the rest of us should listen with open ears.
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