At 16:19 18/05/00 +0100, David Steven wrote:
>Simon - an increasing proportion of pollution **is** coming from the
>developing world and the curve is rising very fast. The argument I was
>making was that this trend will only reverse with economic development (the
>kuznet's curve) - action on poverty and action on the environment thus go
>hand in hand.
Why is an increasing proportion of pollution coming from the developing
world? Because of economic growth and population growth. Economic growth is
causing the problem that you propose it as the solution for.
>Also, as you say, one picks ones pollutants to make different cases. You
>might look at CO2 - I might look at indoor pollution from biomass etc, which
>helps make respiratory illnesses one of the most important killers of the
>world's children.
You are simply picking pollutants to make your case: I am not. There are
very good thermodynamic reasons why consumption of energy and raw materials
are reasonable proxies for the total environmental impact of a society, in
a way that indoor pollution is not. You are confusing the environment with
public health.
The total environmental impact of societies can be expressed by the
equation I=PCT, where I is environmental impact, P is population, C is
consumption per capita and T is the environmental impact of the technology
used. You are asserting that T falls faster than C rises in richer
societies. It is true that Western societies use better T, but not enough
to begin to compensate for their higher C. The industrialised countries
consume most of the world's oil, gas, minerals, wood and even food, even
though they account for less than a fifth of the population. Their
consumption is responsible for most of our species' environmental impact.
If the entire world adopted the Western lifestyle and technologies
tomorrow, the global environmental impact would rise at least five-fold
(according to the Bundtland report in 1987). So much for the environmental
Kuznets curve. We will need much more than that to deal with our
environmental crisis.
Simon
>At 09:12 18/05/00 +0100, David Steven wrote:
>
> >However, because mortality falls before fertility, population has
>increased.
> >More people, more cities. More cities, more environmental damage. And, as
> >a result, an increased proportion of environmental damage comes from poor
> >countries. Poverty correlates with environmental damage, first, because
>the
> >poor cannot afford to bear the cost of environmental protection and,
>second,
> >because basic technologies tend to be dirtier and less efficient. As
> >economies progress, more money is spent on, for example, cleaner
>factories.
> >Thus the Kuznet's Curve.
>
>This is a lovely idea. The only problem is that it isn't quite true. The
>rich consume far more resources per capita (and produce far more pollution)
>than the poor. The industrialised 20% of the world population consumes 60%
>of the energy (and produces a similar proportion of the CO2 emissions) -
>six times as much per capita as the average in the rest of the world. North
>Americans consume 28 times as much energy as Africans. So much for the
>environmental Kuznets curve. The 'evidence' for it is found not by looking
>at total environmental impact, but by carefully selecting certain
>pollutants that have been the target of strong regulatory action and
>showing that their concentrations have fallen in rich countries. But it
>takes no account of actual environmental footprint of rich societies on the
>world as a whole. As they consume more resources, that is actually
>increasing. It's just that the impact is being globalised, so it is less
>apparent in a naive analysis.
>
> >So, in conclusion, environmental improvements do seem to rely on economic
> >development, more sophisticated technologies and human ingenuity (which is
> >where science comes in). As to whether environmental damage can be
> >repaired, often it seems it can. Many so-called reversible cases have
> >indeed been reversed - sometimes astonishingly quickly, as ecosystems
>prove
> >themselves more robust than believed. This is most easily demonstrated on
>a
> >smaller scale. Whether macro-environmental damage (global warming, for
> >example) will have irreversible effects, I really cannot say.
>
>Another lovely idea! Tell it to the countless thousands of species that
>have been made extinct by human beings over the last few centuries.
>
>I would love to hear the explanation of the putative mechanism which could
>reverse global warming in less than the centuries the climatologists
>predict. There is a huge thermal inertia in the oceans, which has kept the
>level of warming down so far. The oceans are gradually heating up. Once
>heated, it will similarly take them a very long time to cool down again,
>even if CO2 emissions disappeared.
>
>Simon Dresner
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