"Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools" - Romans 1:22

[HoreTore]

Yeah, the emission trade is not a failure of the environmental protection groups but of the political and economic implementation.
What it should do though is redistribute money to industries which reduce their emissions, thus making their product cheaper than those from industries which have to pay for their high emission levels. Whether that is actually noticeable or relevant I don't know though.

For us westerners, production costs in China are pretty irrelevant. You as a consumer won't notice it if the Chinese factory increases or decreases its production costs by, say, 20%.

I don't see product price as the problem. What's more of a problem is that we buy one, and then buy a new one a year later because the first one stops working. We've stopped producing durable items, that needs to be changed. Furniture is a good example here. Compare the furniture you've bought with the furniture your grand-parents bought. The drop in quality is extreme. If I buy a table now, it'll get wobbly within a few years. My fathers dinner table, inherited from the 20's, is as sturey as it was when it was made.

Capitalism encourages mass-producing low quality products, and that's the major problem IMO. Furniture, iPhones, cars, etc. All of it is crap, and intended as crap.