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U.S. Given Poor Marks on the Environment
Felicity Barringer, New York Times
A new international ranking of environmental performance puts the United States at the bottom of the Group of 8 industrialized nations and 39th among the 149 countries on the list.
European nations dominate the top places in the ranking, which evaluates sanitation, greenhouse gas emissions, agricultural policies, air pollution and 20 other measures to formulate an overall score, with 100 the best possible.
The top 10 countries, with scores of 87 or better, were led by Switzerland, Sweden, Norway and Finland. The others at the top were Austria, France, Latvia, Costa Rica, Colombia and New Zealand, the leader in the 2006 version of the analysis, which is conducted by researchers at Yale and Columbia Universities.
“We are putting more weight on climate change,” said Daniel Esty, the report’s lead author, who is the director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. “Switzerland is the most greenhouse gas efficient economy in the developed world,” he said, in part because of its use of hydroelectric power and its transportation system, which relies more on trains than individual cars or trucks.
The United States, with a score of 81.0, he noted, “is slipping down,” both because of low scores on three different analyses of greenhouse gas emissions and a pervasive problem with smog. The country’s performance on a new indicator that measures regional smog, he said, “is at the bottom of the world right now.”
He added, “The U.S. continues to have a bottom-tier performance in greenhouse gas emissions.”
(23 January 2008)
Environment damage of rich countries on poor
Roger Highfield, Telegraph (UK)
A study has revealed the extent to which poorer countries are trampled by the huge environmental footprints of the rich.
The environmental damage caused by rich nations disproportionately impacts poor nations and costs them almost £920 billion, on par with or exceeding their combined foreign debt, according to a first-ever global accounting of the dollar costs of countries’ ecological footprints.
Meanwhile, the effect of poor on rich nations, such as Britain, is less than a third of the impact that the rich have on the poor.
Because the global environment does not respect political borders, the impact of ecological damage wrought by one country can be felt across the world. To illustrate that point, an American team has attempted to determine which nations are driving ecological damage and which are paying the price.
(21 January 2008)
Abstract of the paper at PNAS: The debt of nations and the distribution of ecological impacts from human activities. Full paper is behind a paywall. -BA
Elites vs. Greens in the Global South
Walden Bello, FPIF via Znet
… the environmental costs of rapid industrialization are of major concern to significant sectors of the population of developing countries. The environmental movement, moreover, has been a significant actor in the debates in which many countries are exploring alternatives to the destabilizing high-growth model. While the focus of this piece is Asia, many of the same trends can be observed in Latin America, Africa, and other parts of the global South.
The Environmental Movement in the NICs
Among the most advanced environmental movements are those in South Korea and Taiwan, which were once known as “Newly Industrializing Countries” (NICs) or “Newly Industrializing Economies.” This should not be surprising since the process of rapid industrialization in these two societies from 1965 to 1990 took place with few environmental controls, if any. In Korea, the Han River that flows through Seoul and the Nakdong River flowing through Pusan were so polluted by unchecked dumping of industrial waste that they were close to being classified as biologically dead. Toxic waste dumping reached critical proportions. Seoul achieved the distinction in 1978 of being the city with the highest content of sulphur dioxide in the air, with high levels being registered as well in Inchon, Pusan, Ulsan, Masan, Anyang, and Changweon.
In Taiwan, high-speed industrialization had its own particular hellish contours. Taiwan’s formula for balanced growth was to prevent industrial concentration and encourage manufacturers to set up shop in the countryside. The result was a substantial number of the island’s factories locating on rice fields, along waterways, and beside residences. With three factories per square mile, Taiwan’s rate of industrial density was 75 times that of the United States. One result was that 20% of farm land was polluted by industrial waste water and 30% of rice grown on the island was contaminated with heavy metals, including mercury, arsenic, and cadmium.
(23 January 2008)
