To: TobagoJack who wrote (10856 ) 10/31/2006 1:44:49 AM From: Maurice Winn Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 219536 Sore point here for me, so special post: <World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz has publicly complained that Chinese banks ignore human-rights and environmental standards when lending in Africa . > As you know, I was a BP Oil bloke in the 1980s, with environmental matters part of my repertoire in fuels . BP during the 1980s was heavily into health, safety and environmental matters, though only getting going really and I was pushing for promotion of environmental laws to prevent oil company customers polluting the environment. Sure, for example, BP could have just taken the lead out of petrol and charged a lot more money, but research showed that BP would go out of business. It needed governments to make it illegal to include lead. One of the approaches BP took was to create global standards. One of the reasons to do so was because BP could be sued in the USA for actions or omissions anywhere on Earth [though I don't know that that was a reason BP management was using]. The problem with a global standard is that people in India and Africa for example, are NOT worth the same as Americans. The typical response to that is a gasp of horror, accusations of racism and demands for the same standards to be applied everywhere. Excellent idea. But, if BP did that, there would be an increased cost of operations in said poor places. That cost would be paid for by those in said poor places. When a person is worth only $500 a year [as in much of Africa], it is quite a burden on them if "safety" such as a catalytic converter, costs them $100 a year. The catalytic converter prevents benzene and other emissions which can kill people [if they are the unlucky ones] or make their life less pleasant [some air pollution of irritating proportions in the right, crowded, wintry, densely car-crowded urban environments]. But catalytic converters use platinum [and other expensive materials] and as you know, platinum is expensive. Cars with converters use more fuel than cars without. Forcing Africans to pay $100 a year to solve a problem which isn't even on the radar in their lives, is cruelly absurd. That same $100 a year could save many of them from actually dying from easily preventable diseases and could enhance their lives by improving water supplies. China is quite right not to impose Los Angeles environmental and safety standards on impoverished people. Just the town-planning cost of putting up a CDMA base station here is worth many African lives. If lawyers get involved, there are more African lives at stake. In Africa, I suppose they just pop them up anywhere they like any time they like. Same in China. Rightly so too. Imposing a NZ cost on Africa would be insane. Come to think of it, it's insane here too. The Resource Management Act and other government bureaucracy is impoverishing the place. I imagine Africans are quite capable of deciding for themselves how good their standards should be. If they aren't [and they probably aren't, just as NZ is hopeless and so is the USA], then that's their problem, not China's, mine or Wolfowitz's. Mqurice