It’s complicated. Those factories are produced because dirty energy is cheap and the world demands cheap shit. The externality of the carbon emissions is something that can be priced into the cost of consumer goods, but again, people want cheap shit and would riot if the cost of Chinese goods went up some non-trivial amount. The fact of the matter is that clean energy is more expensive, and while that gap has been closing, the inescapable consequence is that we need to either consume less stuff or pay more for it.

We could share energy technology to make them less reliant on coal…