Comment by AlotOfReading

Emissions regulations are a balancing act. Industrial processes are inherently filthy. If you want copper, gold, lithium, or anything else that makes up the modern world, somewhere on earth was dirtied for that to be possible, and some of the pollution will get into the surroundings because zero emissions simply isn't possible. So we set certain levels of "acceptable emissions" as a balancing act.

I also agree that emissions should be tighter, but the location question is more interesting, because we can also choose where emissions happen.

For example, we might choose them to happen near cities/factories so the products are close to where they're used. We've mostly stopped doing that since the industrial revolution for pretty good reasons though. We could place them in the pristine landscapes not otherwise used by humans, like national parks. That's unpopular for hopefully obvious reasons. We could place them in sparsely inhabited deserts abroad, as Europeans did [0], before we collectively decided colonialism was a bad thing.

And lastly, we could place them in figurative deserts away from conservation land and people like monoculture farmland, but then we get to your question.

So, what's left? What are you suggesting as a better alternative?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bou_Craa