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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