wealth
It's not "money is the root of all evil" it's "the love of money is the root of all evil".
No one seems to be condemning wealth, just the all consuming pursuit of more of it.
After all, the only reason china is mentioned in this discussion, is due to it making stuff for us. Why are they doing that ?
Well, some profit making companies discovered that they could make even more profit by getting china to do it for less. And now the games up because the difference in profit is being eaten away by REAL WORLD costs, and prices will now have to rise to keep the companies profits at their inflated level.
So the pursuit of greater profits has put us in this situation. Maybe some of those profits should make sure that the manufacturing process (where ever that takes place) is as clean as possible.
Britain used to be known as the Dirty Man of Europe but we cleaned our act up. Apparently by getting other countries to do what we were chastised for. The world equivalent of being told to tidy your room, and your mother finds it all under the bed.
The real issue is this. Traditional dirty industry has been chased all over the world as the costs have risen. China is just about the last place left to do things on this scale. What if China cleans up completely ? You think their prices are going to stay cheap ? There is just nowhere to get the stuff done cheaper so we will have to deal with this issue sooner or later.
I say we should accept our share of the responsibility and use a proportion of the extra profit made by buying Chinese goods, to help them get cleaned up. This way we can keep the emission sources small and deal with them more efficiently. This is the whole idea behind the electric car - less sources to deal with.
No one has to suffer, nobody goes out of business (except the usual suspects), no "wealth" is lost. Just slightly less profit, for a relatively short amount of time.
BTW, remember the chinese toys with lead in the paint ?
Imported by British firms because they were cheap - more profit.
Lead in the paint or poison in the air, we have a responsibilty, to ourselves if no one else.