Well you could ban at the manufacturing level, and ideally use political pressure to get other countries on board. It wouldn't be a %100 fix, but seems like it would be a simple step in the right direction.
I guess investing into cleaner manufacturing technology would be a start. There'd be a much bigger incentive to do that in another country, or in a China that actually enforced its own laws.
This problem seems completely unrealistic because then you simply buy through the countries they haven't banned? What you're suggesting will only work if said country is a global superpower that can bully every country to tow the line. At the end of the day, no country can produce all the "critical" things it needs so this national security defence of restrictions on trade seems like a very unwise insurance to buy in almost all cases except maybe your millitary supply chain.
You can enforce it using trade bans, don't need military for that. Also, if this would be a global policy then the costs would go globally for everyone making it much easier to cope with since all the competition (on company but also state level) would have the same obligations.
You cannot do that on a nation by nation basis as you will just push the pollution to other unregulated nations - although if done globally, this might work.
Originally the thought was to do this on a product by product basis, but unwinding supply chains is effectively impossible.
Actually, it's still pretty tough because some countries buy and rebrand products to slip around tariffs even now.
I think the best way to do this would be American Congress passing a law giving President power to directly "Ban equivalent companies of other countries, which ban American companies on their respective jurisdiction". This is full of subjective opinionated law to pass, but at least courts would have some ground to held the bans. Courts are good at deciphering "intent" of the law.
Obviously you would need to have a blanket ban on overly large corporations operating in your country and on goods and services produced by overly large corporations being imported into your country. You couldn't apply it only to domestic corporations.
You can argue the should but I very much doubt that it would. We are very happy to let other countries do the dirty work of manufacturing and import the product, and the places that are most likely to manufacture are the least likely to outlaw the production themselves.
It's not to prevent a competitive industry which can just produce something cheaper but also to prevent governments which actively use banned practices to give their nation an unfair advantage. More here:
Unfortunately no government in the world has the courage and conviction to actually do this. They're way too deep in the pockets of corporate interests, who would stand to lose significant profits if these embargoes were implemented.
I've been advocating for responsible and sustainable supply chains for years, but no politician seems to want to follow through with it.
I'm not sure how that would work. One country's power to enforce anything like that would —I think— just look like trade tariffs. This can be effective, but they sometimes just make things more expensive (and in doing so, seem like yet another sacrifice).
But maybe there are enough countries to form a pact, with enough alternative producers available to make this effective.
These also sound like the sort of problems that could be solved without a global sales ban, people seem to really like the Hand of the Market for stuff like this when it's not down nationalist lines.
The Netherlands/EU can ban exports of certain items, they can even nationalize factories if they wanted to.
At this point I think it would be the best that they did, pay AZ/pfizer/moderna royalties but just use the military in a WW2 style effort to produce as many dosages possible.
To make an honest attempt at addressing the problem, you'd need an international treaty. And -- not unlike Kyoto -- unless it included penalties up to and including automatic tariffs to collect those penalties, it would be pointless.
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