How USA is one of top polluters in most sources but is consistently ranked relatively favorably (in the middle) for how polluted it is?
In: Chemistry
Say you are a farmer. You butcher a pig and get a gallon of blood everywhere. Then you take the meat, cook it, and put it on your dinner table. The blood and food happens in the same place.
But now say you get a factory to do your butchering for you. 100 pigs are killed. 100 gallons of blood are spilled. But the meat is then cleaned and put on people’s dinner plate. All the blood is concentrated in one place, and the clean product is in another place.
The same thing applies to the US. Countries like China manufacture a ton of goods. They have factories dumping pollution into the atmosphere. The air is barely breathable. Then the clean products are shipped to the US for Americans to use.
Ultimately, the mess is concentrated in a different place as the finished product. So it depends on how you measure pollution. Most charts chalk up that pollution in China’s bucket, even though Americans are the primary beneficiaries. But depending on how you phrase it, it can go the other way (e.g, if you are talking about carbon footprints).
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