I suspect that even if we totally embargoed China, the effect on day-to-day life in the US would be far less than you’d imagine. There’s a lot of idle production capacity in the US. There’s a lot of equipment that doesn’t REALLY need to be replaced, but typically is earlier than end-of-life due to “fashion” concerns.

Basically, we’d turn from a throwaway economy more towards a fix-whats-broke economy, but life would go on.

The great fuckin’ irony about China vs the US, is that while China is burning a lot of coal now, they’re also on a crash program to build many reactors. This was only briefly slowed down by Fukushima. Whereas the US struggles to get one site approved every decade, because the pseudo-environmentalists can’t be convinced to shut their yap-holes.