>Wirt Atmar writes:
>
>...I am more than modestly encouraged by the general trends
>that the developed nations of the world, and most especially the United States,
>are undergoing in minimizing their environmental footprints.
>
>No one planned these minimizations. They are simply the results of
>increasingly efficient free-market economies and the general mores associated
>with
>wealthy populations, but happily they are consistent with a concomitantly
>increasingly more wealthy, healthy, well-educated and technological
>population. For a
>large number of reasons, these trends all seem to be on the side of the angels
>in that they are both highly moral and ethical.
This is all very perspectival and ideological, I think. There is no free
market, certainly not in the US, where corporations skew decision making
consistently toward protectionism and away from free choice and free access and
free flows of information. So to give the "free market" credit for
environmental "improvements" is at least suspect. The reasons that the air and
water in the US is cleaner today than it was even 30 years ago are at least
two-fold--a vigorous environmental movement that forced government to effect
good choice making in the now distant past, and the huge recent export of
manufacturing activity (and hence pollution) to the less developed world.
{When Larry Summers was Chief Economist at the World Bank, around 1991 I think,
he signed off on a memo arguing that the economically efficient way of dealing
with toxic waste was to ship it to the countries with the lowest life
expectancies--they were going to die early anyway, so were most suitable to
absorb the adverse environmental health impacts of toxicity. There was a furor
and an out-cry, he apologized, and was promoted upward. But think about it.
That is most precisely what we have done. First moving our polluting
production facilities to Mexico, and then to China. Our electronic waste
almost all goes to Asia. Our K-Marts and Wal-Marts are filled with goods
manufactured in China, and we reap the dual benefits of consumer products
available at a fraction of what they would cost us if they were made in the US,
even as the adverse environmental impacts of their production is visited upon
other, more needy, populations.)
> o wealthy populations are significantly more efficient at exploiting
>their natural resources than are poor ones, and thus have a much reduced per
>capita impact on the environment.
>
Yes, but wealthy populations consume far more than poor populations, and their
per capita resource consumption (and so hence their ecological impact) is
substantially higher than those of the developing world. The richest 20% of
the world's population is currently thought to consume over 80% of its
resources, while the poorest 20% gets access to perhaps 2%. We may be more
efficient and we may have "dematerialized" our economies, but it has not been
without huge costs to others. A little humility will go a long way, and
self-congratulations are at least suspect.
Cheers,
-
Ashwani
Vasishth [EMAIL PROTECTED] (323) 462-2884
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~vasishth
