Fuck tariffs, we should be creating options other than abusing poor countries and throwing CEOs in jail for not using those options.

Yeah let Africans and South Americans take their fair share of environmental and economic consequences!

Don't you see, he has a three year old phone, he's sacrificed enough, that 10 year old child soldier has to do his fair share!

The reason to mine it here is the other places are South America China and Africa, where that same industries has far more power far less oversight and can get away with shit like slave labor child labor and buying it from terrorists and warlords who use child soldiers and weaponized rape

How is protecting a status quo not endorsing its consequences?

And I'm not deluded enough to think that global extreme poverty can be solved, but baring a miraculous shift in human nature, one of the very few ways to force changes on a international scale is combining providing less horrible options (I'm not deluded enough to think that something being mined in the US means there are zero consequences) with significant consequences for those who have the option to take them but elect not too.

Situations where you have an incentive to maintain a horrible situation for profit and no alternative to force groups to pursue instead are behind far too many atrocities for me to be okay with saying "it sucks but we can't fix it"

Reclyling and extending the life of existing materials should be done, and people should support expanding human rights and environmental protections.

But the sad reality is that those things will not take effect in time to matter for people currently suffering under the abuses of the way the global economy is currently shaped

If you think that rare earth minerals shouldn't be mined in richer countries you are in fact supporting them being mined in poorer countries where abuse is far more wide spread.

Go fuck yourself. Comparing environmental and worker protects in Aroostook county to places like Burundi where actual slaves are worked to death in mines is nothing at all like that and you should know it.

Do you think people in Aroostook county or people in Burundi will suffer more for having a mine opened around them?

So you're saying that we should only have mines in countries too poor to say no? Because that's the end point of this kind of thinking

The poorest areas of the US that have mines have some of the best protected environments and citizens of anywhere in the world with mines.

Or do you think Aroostook is at risk of the fucking Wagner group seizing control of a mine claiming it was because they aren't being paid and removing any protections the workers and people who live around the mine have?

So instead these things should only be mined in poor countries that can't afford to contain or prevent environmental damage, frequently by child or slave labor, with little to no oversight?

There's no evidence of a Maine lobster trap ever killing a whale, and the most recent evidence of one injuring a whale is more than a decade ago. Canadian (and for that matter other states with weaker regulations on traps) traps on the other hand there is plenty of evidence of injured and dead whales. You're right of course, you can't prove a negative, but when there isn't evidence of Maine lobster traps harming whales but there is evidence of other states and countries traps doing it, the solution isn't to assume Maine is just as bad as the others and getting lucky, but to look at what Maine is doing that they aren't.

Maine has far stronger whale safety regulations than other states and especially fucking Canada, which are widely if not universally observed, because even if lobstermen don't give a shit about whales, they want the industry to be sustainable.

There is lots of evidence that Maine lobstermen, unlike Canadian ones, have adopted safer gear in large part because Maine has stricter regulations on it than Canada or other US states (looking at you Massholes). This is punishing Mainers for Massholes and Canadians recklessness

That's fucking idiotic. There has never been a Maine lobstering related whale death.

This is just window dressing, taking it out on a small part of the market, a luxury good in most of the world, instead of targeting large scale fishing and transportation that actually is killing whales.

And celebrating this because some lobstermen are Republicans is literally the kind of elitist bullshit that people like Trump and LePage cash in on to play grievance politics when they can't get votes on issues.

Yeah CMP has nothing to do with supply costs, but their record profits sure as fuck could be going into more line crews and preemptive tree work to limit outages.

NLRB is going to have something to say about that

Same shit they pulled in California