Eaglelord17 said:
If we stopped shipping our raw resources to places like China, they would be forced to seriously cut their manufacturing, which would only help the planet.
That's not at all how commodities work. Commodities of the sort you're talking about are 'fungible'. China can import product x from Canada and use it as a raw material in production of a given item. If they don't get that raw material from us, they can just as easily import it from someone else and use it interchangeably.
As an actual example, let's take Ethylene Glycol. It's an industrial chemical used to make, among other things, polyester. A key material in low skill, low tech manufacturing such as clothing, furniture stuffing, etc. Pretty good, simple example.
Let's say tomorrow we decide we're no longer going to sell China Ethlyene Glycol. We sell them a lot of it, however we are one of a number of exporters. If Canada were to stop selling it to them, they would turn around and buy it from Saudi Arabia, for a slightly less cost efficient transaction. Demand for Saudi Ethlyene Gloycol goes up, price goes up a bit. But now we have a bunch we need to sell to someone else. Demand for ours is down, demand for Saudi product is up. We get a slight cost advantage that offsets transportation costs. Malaysia and Singapore both come knocking, and we sell ours to them instead of china. Supply and demand balance out, prices blip fractionally and stabilize. That's it. Substitute crud eoil, bauxite, what, whatever you want- simply refusing to sell to China would not be crippling or even particularly problematic thing. But, because we're now flexing weight we don't have, they might turn around and slap an export tariff on consumer gods that they have a commanding supply position in. Maybe a 10% export tariff on Apple products. Or maybe they slap a premium on the export of rare earth elements that we need for high tech and military production. Something to slap us around a bit and remind us that the tail does not wag the dog.
China is one of the biggest problems in moving towards more environemtnally friendly global supply chains... *but* they are also not idiots. They're choking on smog. China is very pragmatic, very rational, and extremely strategic. They're perfectly content to set thing in motion that will take 30, 50, or 100 years if it suits their long term national interest. We cannot coerce them. We can support the gneeration of sound science, we can support the incubation of technological inovation that creates more energy efficient products and processes, we can support advanced materials research, we can do things to improve the economics of more environmentally friendly power production, be it renewable or nuclear... Stuff like that. We can develop and refine (no pun intended) solutions that will provide options as other countries - including China - recognize that there are problems.
The earth's environment is a tragedy of the commons. Some will realize it sooner, some later. There's little to nothing we can do on an individual level to tangibly affect it other than making sentiments known to political leaders and at the ballot box. I wish our politicians could be less ideological and more evidence based about this- on all parties.