We can look at China that is focused on growth at all costs. If you look at rare earth metals, they're equally distributed but they are toxic to extract. The west has pretty much stopped extracting. China is still going full steam ahead.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-the-toxic...
China would bulldoze my hometown in 2 seconds if it meant an addition 0.1 GDP. I would say that the US is between Europe and China for balancing GDP vs protecting its citizens.
>We can look at China that is focused on growth at all costs.
It's easy to look down on others from an ivory tower in the wealthy developed west, but consider that China was dirt poor a few decades ago. What else would you have chosen? Die of poverty while protecting the environment? Same with India. They did what they had to in order to survive.
The west did that too in the industrial revolution. China had to speed run decades of industrial evolution in years. So why gaslight other countries for doing the same thing your country did a few decades earlier?
The good news for them is China recently stopped extracting rare earths on the cheap for the west. Their cities, air, water are waaay cleaner than they were just a decade ago. Chinese cities are actually livable now.
That's why the west is scrambling to find alternative sources on the cheap in other places that will let their environment be trashed, like Ukraine and Africa, since China doesn't want to be the west's easily exploitable environmental pay-piggy anymore, and good for them.
The bad news for the planet is that environmental destruction is not stopping, it's just moving away from China to other poorer places with weaker economies and militaries who are more malleable to western pressure and corporate demands.
>China would bulldoze my hometown in 2 seconds if it meant an addition 0.1 GDP.
Your western nation most likely did the same from the industrial revolution till WW2.
I'm not looking down at China. I use using it as an example of there's a trade off between environmental and growth. I don't believe I offered a value statement. Yes the USA is famous for breaking treaties with the Native Americans whenever they found resources on the Native American's reservations. The USA seized private property to give to a pharmaceutical company.[0]
Do you believe there can be trades off between consumer, environmental protections, and GDP? I do.
Everything has tradeoffs. You can protect children extremely well, if you mandate that every household have a live-in social worker, subsidized by the government with a 30% caretaker tax on top of standard income tax. If a government were to pass such legislation, do you hate children and love money that much to want to repeal it?
At some point, protections are not feasible - and the EU's "consumer and environmental" protections are apparently unfeasibly expensive in their current form to have a competitive economy. This is also self-defeating, as only in the context of a competitive economy, would these protections have any merit or be enforceable. Beggars can't be choosers.
But I disagree with your sentiment that the EU is going too far. Look at how healthy and happy the US is and how happy and healthy we are. The market, corporations and the economy are there to serve us, not to dominate us. Their existence is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Consumer and environmental protection are not a luxury, it's essential.
And surely, tariffs and trade wars have nothing to do with anything, right? It's just this damn overregulation and nothing else!!111
