Under WTO rules, environmental laws and principles, however carefully designed, are subordinated. While a given country would be free to write its own environmental regulations, a company based in that country is free to bypass those regulations when manufacturing the identical product off-shore, in a country with relaxed or no environmental regulations. It could then import that product into the country that had restrictive regulations." "The inevitable result of the WTO is that the rewards of international trade go to the cheapest producer, not necessarily the most responsible producer. A company that allows child labor, that allows workers to be exposed to unnecessary and dangerous amounts of pesticides, that takes few if any measures to mitigate its impact upon the environment, is in a stronger competitive position than a domestic producer that obeys more restricted labor and environmental laws. China is a perfect case in point. It is pursuing solar energy manufacturing with a vengeance, but without the necessary controls on pollution. Producers of polysilicon for photovoltaic panels employ a number of dangerous and toxic chemicals. For every ton of polysilicon that is produced, four tons of silicon tetrachloride is made. Reports from China describe silicon tetrachloride scattered over the countryside where polysilicon plants are located. In the United States and Germany, silicon tetrachloride is processed and recycled, an expensive and energy-intensive process. In China, the bubbling white liquid containing silicon tetrachloride is being dumped. This is how Ren Bingyan, professor at Hebei Industrial University, describes it: "The land where you dump or bury it will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in the place....It is like dynamite---it is poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it." Whereas Western firms produce polysilicon at $84,000 a ton owing to expensive pollution controls, the Chinese are able to produce it at between $21,000 and $56,000 a ton. Because there is now a glut of polysilicon at lower prices, responsible manufacturers are losing money. One Chinese plant, Luoyang Zhonggui Hi-Technology Company, located in Henan Province, sold its polysilicon to Suntech Power Holdings, the third largest manufacturer of photovoltaic panels in the world; its founder, Shi Zhengrong, was named the richest person in China in 2008. Because of WTO rules, there is nothing that responsible manufacturers can do to combat the inherent injustice of what is called competition." [...] "WTO policies...force the world to devolve to the lowest common denominator of commerce, which is growth of sales, reduction of corporate costs, and enhancement of profit regardless of the impact on local societies or ecosystems." [...] "In a sense, the WTO is the last and most important goal of hyperindustrialization, as it eliminates local or regional restrictions on corporate behavior." [...] "Large-scale ventures often reduce ecological richness and human-scale endeavors to trivialities. Because we are caught between the conflicting desires for freedom and order, we are both attracted to and repelled by large organizations." [...] "While we watch financial institutions being bailed out by taxpayers because they're "too big to fail," we miss the point: if something is too big to fail, it is too big. Everything in nature is designed to fail. A rationale of capitalism was the ability to adapt and learn or be competitively displaced. No longer.
Paul Hawken's Ecology of Commerce
