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If major companies sourcing in developing countries care only about price and quality, local suppliers will be lured to cut corners on environmental standards to win contracts.

Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.

Regulatory failings mean that the cost of breaking the law is far below that of obeying it - businesses are happier to pay fines than to control pollution.

What they are doing is taking something that otherwise creates pollution and turning it into something useful.

Politicians usually get the blame for dragging their feet on environmental issues. And fair enough. Most of them do just that. But the blame isn't theirs alone. For politicians afraid of losing votes, a bristling media waiting to transform good green ideas into monsters is a colossal disincentive.

The potential in many environmental issues is that if you undertake corrective action without appropriate understanding of the problem, then you wind up doing more harm than good.

In the U.S. you have a system of lobbying and influence on our policy and law makers which is incredibly pronounced. The gas industry spent $250 million getting an exemption from our Safe Water Act. Every one of those dollars is toxic; a contaminant in our political system. It disrupts the normal flow of justice, science, fact and reporting.

Ever since I've been in Congress, various groups on the business side, those entities that are creating jobs out there, have felt that the Clean Air Act is really - that there are all sorts of presumptions in favor of the environmentalists.

The market is a brilliant system for the exchange of goods and services, but it doesn't protect the environment unless it's regulated, it doesn't train your workforce unless it's regulated, and it doesn't give you the long-term investment you want.

But my point is that you design something in the end that precludes any unhealthy trading practices that are not going to serve your environmental or your economic objectives but now is not the time to do it.