What Is the Most Important Challenge Facing the US?

That would be the Democrats, as evidenced by the latest CBS poll.

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Foxfyre wrote:

While I think you're grasping at straws here in a futile attempt to avoid admitting defeat on this issue, this one hangs you:

Now's your chance to say things like this ( Laughing

), as I said I will not argue with your conviction here.

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Damn it Craven, I hate it when you're nice and I have to feel all warm and fuzzy. Ick. Smile

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haha! Ick, she says! I love it. Smile

Craven, your avatars just get handsomer each minute, heh heh.
You go Edgar!

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Fortunately CBS polls are almost never anywhere close to the objective polls.

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Craven de Kere wrote:

Fox's assertion was ridiculous.

It's true that the poor don't usually have as much concern for the eviroment because they have more pressing concerns.

Thing is, concern for their enviroment is not the primary factor in polluting it. Desire for material goods and the subsequent production is. So historically, the wealthy have always been responsible for a ridiculously large portion of the polluting. Even if they produce more green types the lifestyle drive more polluting.

Even the greenies in wealthy countries usually lead a lifestyle that taxes the enviroment far more than that of a poor person.

It's very surprising that you buy into Foxfyre's absurd claim at all. The US, where there are a lot of green types, drives a lot of the polluting.

Perhaps your surprise is due to incorrectly reading my posts.

These are the two points I agreed with Fox on:

1), "that the poor are more likely to take [pollution] in their stride - what, already having to worry about getting enough food, makes the list of priorities look differently" - rather a duh statement, as I already noted; and

2), "that since richer people are less likely to "accept" pollution (what, having the energy and resources to spend on nimby causes), "the world's most polluted" places tend to end up in "the world's poorest" places."

I then continued to note that, "In Europe the Green movement was far larger and more successful in the prosperous north than in the less wealthy south [and east]" and that its probably the same in the US - as something that underlines observation number 1).

Yup - and thats about all I said on the matter. Whatever else you see me "buying into" goes on your own account.

But, for the record - of course - yes, I too think that Fox's idea of a solution - "just find ways to help everybody get rich and the world's environmental problems will be taken care of", is ridiculous. It blatantly confuses symptom and cause.

Greater wealth comes, alas, with greater pollution, at least if it's generated the way it has been generated throughout the 19th and 20th century. The fact that, once the greater wealth has created all that pollution, the now newly wealthy people will then get around to trying to do something about it is a bit "mustard after the meal". And their efforts, thus far, as often as not merely result in the polluters moving shop to some place with fewer nimby activists - while still producing stuff for those very same nimbys.

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Exactly right.

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You mean we can't just print up million dollar bills and make everybody rich to solve the problem?

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I don't believe I suggested a magic wand which, despite what some of you think politicians have, isn't in the cards. But to say that to help people become successful and prospersous should not be a national/world initiative is to me short sighted beyond belief. I disagree that pollution has to be a given if more people become prosperous. Even if some kinds of pollution increase as third world countries begin to industrialize, other kinds of pollution will almost certainly be reduced. And all pollution can be temporary if the effort is successful.

In my way of thinking, this is the only long range effective solution to world wide pollution. At the national level, year by year the rivers become cleaner, the air more breathable, and the highways and byways more beautiful as more and more people become prosperous and demand it.

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It is, in my opinion, foolish to cast the issue of environmental degradation in terms of class.

There is a basic flaw in the entire line of argument, thus far. Serious environmental impairment is not limited to pollution.

Overgrazing by livestock or deforestation for the purpose of creating agricultural fields is responsible for the destruction of rain forests, and the creation of new deserts by the stripping of fertile top soil from the land through erosion. On the same continuum, water centered eco-systems are being choked to death by the run off of millions of tons of silt.

To some extent industrialization (particularly logging) contributes to these problems, but it would be ignorant to dismiss the impact of an excessive number of very low tech, very poor people on the face of the earth.

It is also erroneous to suggest that affluence and consumption are primary drivers of pollution.

China, the former Soviet Union and the former Soviet Bloc Eastern Europe have extremely dismal environmental records. Can any of these areas be accused of extreme affluence and consumption?

What is true is what Foyfyre has argued. Affluent, democratic nations, while having their own environmental problems, also have the luxury to direct their attention to them and even risk retarding their economic growth, to create solutions to them.

In nations where the citizens exist at the subsidence level, the ramifications of environmental damage on future years let alone future generations is sublimated by the daily imperative to simply survive.

So the poor of the world don't have the time to concern themselves with environmental degradation, and, at the same time, they are heavy contributors to the problem.

The reality is that only in affluent democratic nations have some aspects of pollution and environmental degradation been actually rolled back. For the rest of the world the problem is steadily getting worse.

A recent news story tells us of an unfortunate woman in Florida who died as a result of an alligator attack. It wasn't all that long ago that alligators in America were on the endangered species list. Since then the alligator population has thrived to the point where it represents a threat (albeit a statistically minimal one) to humans.

At the same time there are any number of success stories in this country about land restoration and pollution reduction.

This is not to minimize the ongoing danger of environmental degradation or dismiss the need for increased diligence, but it is to say that the success stories, such as they may be, are happening, overwhelmingly, in affluent and democratic nations.

Thus Foxfyre is quite correct that a major step in solving our environmental problems is the creation of democracy and affluence throughout the globe, and (Surprise, Surprise) this is also a major step in solving most of the world's other problems.

Sounds like a neo-con solution.

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Foxfyre wrote:

But to say that to help people become successful and prospersous should not be a national/world initiative is to me short sighted beyond belief.

Lucky thing, then, that nobody said that, either. (What is it with all of you and what you "read" into each other's posts?)

All people said was that they rejected your argument that as countries become more prosperous, pollution will be solved. The opposite is more likely to happen.

That doesn't, however, mean that we therefore think that those other countries shouldnt get more prosperous. There's at least two other options.

One: we know it will increase pollution, but we accept that as the necessary prize for lifting the developing world out of poverty.

Two: the awareness that increased prosperity in the developing world is likely to go hand-in-hand with further mass pollution in our view shows the urgency of promoting more durable ways of development. If 1 billion Chinese are all going to want their own car, somebody'd better come up with a good electrical or hydrogen-based system. If 50 million Brazilians are all going to get housing and free-time spending like Americans have, somebody'd better put a big safe fence around the (remaining) Amazon rain forest.

Increased prosperity in the West has gone hand-in-hand with mass pollution. But then it wasn't called "industrial revolution" for no reason. There are other ways to increase prosperity. India and the far East have already taken up lots of IT, hi-tech and service jobs, partly serving customers here in the West. And there are more ecologically sound ways of going about development - they can learn from our mistakes.

What greatly complicates implementing these lessons though is the increasingly unbridled mobility of investment ("flash money", we call it). Multinationals instinctively will look for the country where costs are lowest. Environmental standards make production more expensive. So if, say, India should decide to sensibly start setting some ground rules for new industrial projects, the multinational will just go to Birma, where a corrupt dictatorship will allow it to do anything it wants as long as it pays enough bakshish.

There's a role for us here. Those same American (or European) companies that have cleant up their act - or moved it out altogether, back here, are paying a lot less attention to pollution in countries where the impoverished government is in no position to make demands. Our government could impose standards on our companies' operations abroad, too (or at least, for example, itself decide to only buy from companies that can prove they operate in environmentally sound ways, even in their newly established Uzbek factory). The WTO could grow some (more) teeth and put some global groundrules in place. Dont like government? Then the same tools are in our hands as consumers. We can take up that responsibility and show that a nimby's "back yard" extends to wherever our countries' companies move production.

Three: the above is all the more true since much of the polluting industry in the developing countries is geared at production for the First World market. It is our material demands that are being met by those dirty, cheap factories or oil fields in Nigeria or China. Having imposed environmental standards on, say, automobile production (random example, might not be the right one) here - but still demanding cheap cars to be available at the car dealers' - we have simply moved the factory owners to shift their production line to Mexico. In many cases we've moved the problem rather than solved it.

Hence also, four: we might have to start considering that, if everyone is to have the same rights to acquire prosperity, but a degree of increased pollution is unavoidable - then perhaps we will need to scale down our own consumption a bit.

At the moment, the demand of consumers in the West still accounts for a dominant share in the worldwide exploitation and consumption of natural resources. Exploitation of natural resources brings pollution and destruction of natural habitats - just look at an oil field, or the dissappearing rain forest, or an iron ore mine. If we accept that, as developing countries become more prosperous, overall consumption will drastically increase, it is crucial that we start applying environmental standards to our own consumption behaviour, as "consumption leaders" in the world.

Foxfyre wrote:

all pollution can be temporary if the effort is successful.

We wont be able to re-create the rain forest ... or the thousands of species that are dying out ... et cetera. We can make amends now, and air and water quality have clearly improved again since the fifties or seventies, but we can never retrieve the natural wealth that was lost.

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Finn d'Abuzz wrote:

It is also erroneous to suggest that affluence and consumption are primary drivers of pollution.

China, the former Soviet Union and the former Soviet Bloc Eastern Europe have extremely dismal environmental records. Can any of these areas be accused of extreme affluence and consumption?

Compared to the status ante quo? Most certainly, yes. Just compare 1980 Russia to 1910 Russia. The extreme measures of pollution in the Soviet Union directly resulted from the massive inroads made in terms of industrial production. (In Tsarist Russia, industry was only just budding). That the production was mistargeted and that much of it yielded little for the average citizen doesnt change the basic pattern: "up" in industrial production meant "up" in pollution.

Forsure, it was exacerbated by the pitfalls of Communist government: a penchant for secrecy and cover-ups, a lack of organised criticism that could have sounded the alarm when something went wrong, an overriding emphasis on ever more production, in name of the Five-year-plan. The liberal, capitalist world has shown itself better capable of innovating itself into cleaner means of production. But here, too, it took well over a century - much of the Soviet Union's mass pollution was well equalled by a previous generation of England's or America's industries ...

So, can one add a criteria? Yes - one can surmise that a corrupt or dictatorial governmental system will be less able to alert itself to (the danger of) pollution and to develop innovative solutions than a democratic government. But nevertheless, both are grappling with the same basic, general problem: increased production by definition implies increased pollution, unless you manage to impose some "durable" standards right from the start. And thats our challenge now, imho.

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To argue that wealth doesn't produce more polution is so illogical, I'm not sure how anybody can come to that conclusion. On the other hand, it is possible to minimize polution of our productive systems by understanding how to protect our environment. A good example is the automobile. This world produces more automobiles today than any time in the past. Those countries that do not control the smog output of automobiles continue to polute their environment. California has very strong control on the output of smog, and our air today is better than it was several decades ago. Consumption by a greater number of the world population will result in the consumption of limited resources on this planet; there's a limit unless man is able to replace raw materials it uses. Government and industry must work in concert to control polution, because consumers will buy what is available in the market place.

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C.I. says that wealth creates pollution, yet California's air is cleaner than it has been in a long time. Anybody see a contradiction here? Is it just possible that people who have the luxury to demand clean water, air, and beautiful surroundings see to it that they have clean water, air and beautiful surroundings?

I maintain it is not wealth that creates pollution but lack of wealth that creates pollution. I've already posted some links to support this and will not post them again.

I agree with Nimh that we cannot recapture destroyed species and I can't imagine that any of us who have the luxury of controlling our environment do not feel loss when that happens. But while we should insist on ethical policies and practices and minimize the damage as we can, it would be immoral to deny third world countries the opportunity to lift themselve out of poverty even if the earth suffers some temporal damage along the way. We already had our time of growth and now we do things better. So will they. The earth is a pretty durable old planet that will survive a little new prosperity.

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nimh,

I am sorry if I misread your meaning, when you say things like "But on a macro-scale, Fox's assertion still seems an obvious enough one to me" it is confusing, see on the macro-scale is where Foxfyre is the most wrong, and by agreeing with "Fox's assertion" you do not delineate between buying her conclusion or just two individual elements along the way.

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Finn d'Abuzz wrote:

It is, in my opinion, foolish to cast the issue of environmental degradation in terms of class.

Upon what is this opinion based?

Class has a relationship with many metrics related to pollution.

Quote:

There is a basic flaw in the entire line of argument, thus far. Serious environmental impairment is not limited to pollution.

Quite right, but that does not illustrate a "basic flaw" in the discussion about wealth and pollution, just that you seek to widen the scope (which is perfectly compatible with the discussion).

Quote:

To some extent industrialization (particularly logging) contributes to these problems, but it would be ignorant to dismiss the impact of an excessive number of very low tech, very poor people on the face of the earth.

Apparently just this far into your post it ceased to be "foolish to cast the issue of environmental degradation in terms of class".

Class is important, the lower classes often employ methods that a small amount of cultural development would teach them not to, and the methods are frequently abusive of the enviroment.

You are correct to highlight "low tech" methods, one good example is the scorching of earth by short-sighted farmers.

Quote:

It is also erroneous to suggest that affluence and consumption are primary drivers of pollution.

No, it is not.

Quote:

China, the former Soviet Union and the former Soviet Bloc Eastern Europe have extremely dismal environmental records. Can any of these areas be accused of extreme affluence and consumption?

Finn, you've made a really silly error here.

Finn, where does China's production go? Do you assert that the demand by affluent nations does not effect it?

Let me explain why this argument makes no sense:

China, to use just one example, is a nation that does a lot of production for other nations. Pointing out that it is not affluent ignores that the nations that are affluent put a demand on China's production.

Quote:

What is true is what Foyfyre has argued. Affluent, democratic nations, while having their own environmental problems, also have the luxury to direct their attention to them and even risk retarding their economic growth, to create solutions to them.

All the while increasing demand on production that generates far more pollution than any of their concern reduces.

Finn, do you think the US pollutes a lot (in total volume) or not?

We can check this kind of thing against reality.

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nimh wrote:

Finn d'Abuzz wrote:
It is also erroneous to suggest that affluence and consumption are primary drivers of pollution.

China, the former Soviet Union and the former Soviet Bloc Eastern Europe have extremely dismal environmental records. Can any of these areas be accused of extreme affluence and consumption?

Compared to the status ante quo? Most certainly, yes. Just compare 1980 Russia to 1910 Russia. The extreme measures of pollution in the Soviet Union directly resulted from the massive inroads made in terms of industrial production. (In Tsarist Russia, industry was only just budding). That the production was mistargeted and that much of it yielded little for the average citizen doesn't change the basic pattern: "up" in industrial production meant "up" in pollution.

Forsure, it was exacerbated by the pitfalls of Communist government: a penchant for secrecy and cover-ups, a lack of organised criticism that could have sounded the alarm when something went wrong, an overriding emphasis on ever more production, in name of the Five-year-plan. The liberal, capitalist world has shown itself better capable of innovating itself into cleaner means of production. But here, too, it took well over a century - much of the Soviet Union's mass pollution was well equalled by a previous generation of England's or America's industries ...

So, can one add a criteria? Yes - one can surmise that a corrupt or dictatorial governmental system will be less able to alert itself to (the danger of) pollution and to develop innovative solutions than a democratic government. But nevertheless, both are grappling with the same basic, general problem: increased production by definition implies increased pollution, unless you manage to impose some "durable" standards right from the start. And thats our challenge now, imho.

nimh

I don't think we are actually too far apart on this, but I have to say that using a comparison between the Russias of 1980 and 1910 to assert that the Soviet union was extreme in its affluence and consumption is ridiculous.

By that logic, current day Sierra Leone is extreme in its affluence and consumption.

From a baseline where there is no industrialization, it goes without saying that with increased production there is increased pollution. However from the baseline of an already industrialized world, it is not, at all, axiomatic that increased production results in increased pollution, and it is affluence (enabled by democracy) which can and will lead to a change in the original paradigm.

I could be wrong, but it appears that you are stuck in the thinking that only limitations can solve our pollution problems, and that to do so there is an inevitable need to reduce consumption ( if not affluence). Limits, in the form of standards are necessary, but only to drive technological improvements that will allow increased production with a decrease in pollution. It will likely be quite some time, if ever, before we are able to produce without any pollution, but it's not realistic to establish (in anything but the very long term) a zero pollution goal. The Western world will not give up the advantages of production for zero pollution and even if we did, we would be in no position to enforce such an approach throughout the rest of the world.

Industrialization is here to stay, like it or not. Through advances in technology, it can change substantially, but we will (barring the apocalypse) be in the business of producing things for as far out as any of us can imagine.

I notice that you seem to have ignored the other aspect of my argument, that environmental degradation is not limited to pollution and that in this respect the "have not" nations of the world are the primary culprits, and not only because they are attempting to reach the status of the "have" nations.

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cicerone imposter wrote:

To argue that wealth doesn't produce more polution is so illogical, I'm not sure how anybody can come to that conclusion.

Rather than simply shake your head at the arguments of others, why don't you attempt to make the logical case for how weath will, inevitably, produce more pollution. Then we might have something to discuss.

On the other hand, it is possible to minimize polution of our productive systems by understanding how to protect our environment. A good example is the automobile. This world produces more automobiles today than any time in the past. Those countries that do not control the smog output of automobiles continue to polute their environment. California has very strong control on the output of smog, and our air today is better than it was several decades ago.

My goodness, do you realize that you have just made an argument for the premise that increased wealth can lead to decreased pollution?

Consumption by a greater number of the world population will result in the consumption of limited resources on this planet; there's a limit unless man is able to replace raw materials it uses. Government and industry must work in concert to control polution, because consumers will buy what is available in the market place.

Increased consumption will lead to a decrease in nonrenewable resources.

A decrease in nonrenewable resources does not equate to pollution, let alone an increase in pollution.

The exhaustion of nonrenewable resources is certainly something of which to be concerned but it has no obvious link to an increase in pollution.(On the contrary, if we cannot develop renewable resources, eventually our pollution problems will be solved.) Thus, increased consumption will not, necessarily, result in increased pollution

In the short term, and within the current global context, increased consumption, worldwide, will likely lead to increased pollution, but this is because the developing nations will not have the same advantage of comfortable affluence from which to examine the impact of the environment on sustained affluence. Therefore it would seem to be in the interest of the affluent nations who are currently implementing means to reduce pollution, to see that the developing nations become affluent as soon as possible so that they too can move off the "live for today" perspective of the impoverished.

Coincidently, this same solution applies to the problems of environmental degradation that are not pollution related.

Guess what? The best way to assure affluence is to assure democracy.

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Also it is rather specious I think to suggest that because other peoples are encouraged to produce in order to supply the markets created by the higher consuming more prosperous democratic peoples, the pollution in the poorer country is the fault of the more prosperous one. I don't believe any democracies are forcing anybody to do anything so far as production goes. We should demand moral and ethical practices from our own who operate in other countries of course.

But our creating better jobs for people who had poorer jobs or no jobs before cannot help but raise the standard of living for poorer people. I think people who are more affluent are far more likely to see the value of and push for democracy than are those in abject poverty who have no hope. And, as Finn observes, democracy is the recipe for prosperity, and that brings us back to prosperity over the long haul will improve the environment.

But again before we completely highjack this thread, we should remember that there are fanatical people in the world who don't give a flying fig about the environment. These people will poison our water, our air, and the ground we walk on given an opportunity to do so. Normal temporary degradation of environment due to normal human activity pales in the face of that threat. Let's vote for the party with the proven track record for dealing with it.

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Finn d'Abuzz wrote:

I don't think we are actually too far apart on this, but I have to say that using a comparison between the Russias of 1980 and 1910 to assert that the Soviet union was extreme in its affluence and consumption is ridiculous. [..]

From a baseline where there is no industrialization, it goes without saying that with increased production there is increased pollution.

Well, quite. And though many developing countries already have blossoming/sprawling industries, much of the developing world is still in a pre-industrialised stage, like Tsarist Russia was. To assert, as Fox did, that once these areas and countries get more prosperous, the problem of pollution will be "solved" is therefore ridiculous, because said prosperity will for at least a large part be fuelled by industrialisation. The example of the Soviet Union actually shows that pollution there, too, came with increased prosperity and industrialisation. So instead of refuting the assertion that more affluence and consumption will (at least initially) result in more pollution, as you claimed it did, it actually underlines it.

Of course, the developing countries theoretically have the benefit of the lessons we've learned. Over time, we have come to produce in cleaner ways - you could hope that countries starting or progressing on the industrialisation path now use the cleaner tools straight away. Problem is, much of this cleaner production is also more expensive for the company involved than the old-fashioned dirty production. Much of it is only used here because we've put laws and regulations about it in place. Third World governments do not have the luxury to make much of such demands to (either domestic or foreign) companies. Employment and investment are hard enough to come by as it is.

Separate from this is the issue that even our present-day "cleaner" stuff - say, our cars - are still polluting enough for it to be a environmental disaster if everyone in the world would have one. That means either a much more drastic push towards cleaner technology (in this example, electric or hydrogen-based cars or whatever one could come up with) has to take place, or we do need to check our consumption behaviour. Probably both.

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