>What if my business didn’t produce hazardous waste.

Then it wouldn’t be a good fit for an analogy regarding the externalities of globalism.

> Environmental controls can only be implemented at the national and international level.

False. Apple could have actually applied their own internal standards that they market, and shareholders could also have standards(lol).

>if the US bans Chinese batteries, it makes US made cars uncompetitive

You don’t say, this has been a tad condescending my dude. That said, aren’t batteries kind of an ironic choice given that Tesla built its gigafactory here? Which kinda illustrates what bugs me about the realities of globalism, most of the time regulations on industry predominantly increase start-up costs. Having dealt with both OSHA and the EPA extensively in the manufacturing sector, the marginal cost of compliance was typically low, but only once the process was set up.

>so it’s never free trade at fault, it’s lack of international cooperation on environmental policies.

I’m mostly with you here, I place a great deal of the blame on corrupt politicians in the West. But I disagree that it’s not the fault of free trade. Free trade is an animal and globalism is its handler. Globalism in the west has failed to rein in the beast that is the free market. Leaders pay plenty of lip service to the human cost of things and the environment. But as the dominant species on the planet we should be striving to prevent rising cultures from making the same mistakes that cultures who have already lifted themselves up made. Our planet can’t take us all following the same path.

I strongly believe and advocate that Western countries should band together and form a trade union based on occupational safety and environmental protection. Because until they do that, I see all of the liberal grandstanding about saving the environment and wanting things made safely as nothing but fraud. These departments do little but shift the damage somewhere else, and I care not at all where the person getting cancer from the mine is from, or who pours chemicals into the water. I care that it happens at all.

>your arguments are made disingenuously by labor unions.

Well I’m really not sure if it’s important that they make it disingenuously, but I will certainly agree that enforcing minimum wage in other countries is ridiculous. And I’m all for offshoring when it’s a good fit, but if a product is sold in a country it should be manufactured following the same environmental and occupational safety regulations as the country in which it is to be sold. I’m 100% for bringing up poorer countries, but we should be strongly disincentivizing avoiding automation in favor of loosely regulated human capital. I’ve watched many manufacturing businesses get killed in the US as a result of these sorts of regulations, and it’s horrifying to me. It’s super sad to see a US manufacturing sector business die from the proverbial straw, knowing that it will be replaced with a business in another country doing things considerably worse.

So I have a kind of rule about regulation that I also advocate.

If a regulation of a given industry creates a burden, then policy should be adopted to offset that burden either through trade policy(tariffs/duties,ideally as a block of developed nations) or through domestic policy(subsidies or grants to help bring them to compliance).

I disagree that only western countries should be advancing out of these jobs. Human kind as a whole should be advancing out of as many of them as we can, and many times we have the means to do so, but it’s cheaper just to be happy with our community advancing past these jobs.