The Progressive Downsides of Globalization

We can’t censor political speech, we can’t raise the corporate tax rate, and the Green New Deal won’t work.

Hong Kong. Photo by Mark Goh on Unsplash.

The developing world over, deforestation is still a major concern. Though it has fallen out of fashion, deforestation remains one of most serious problems faced by the environmental movement.

Some environmentalists have even decried the extinction earth crowd for distracting from some of the most pressing, immediate, and obvious, environmental problems the world is facing right now- not in ten years- like the destruction of wildlife habitats, ocean pollution and single use plastics.

Dealing with deforestation, not to mention habitat loss and pollution, is a big enough problem without complicating the matter with complex carbon offset credit schemes, these battled hardened eco-warriors insist.

They are perhaps right to remind us that emerging nations are now seeing the worst excesses of their own industrial revolutions. Lest we forget, in the United States, in the post-industrial, pre-regulatory Wild West, new American companies dumped and pumped raw sewage, trash, pesticides, slag and industrial waste into the air and waterways with impunity.

We now have environmental laws for the same reason we have child labor laws- because we must.