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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pezz who wrote (3092)	1/30/2004 7:25:11 PM
From: k.ramesh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 36918

Nothing new to report. I am not minimizing the impact of population growth, in fact I mentioned that countries with high population growth have been working on it for years, it might be of sudden interest to you, but China has had a one child policy for how long now? India has had a Family Planning program for almost all of its 50 odd years of independence. This is yet another place where the devil is in the details and the 'real experts' continue to address the problem in more nuanced ways.In India again the problem of population growth itself has been 'won' in atleast 1/2 the states, and again my emphasis was on the fact that it takes a very long time to stop the demographic train, the victory has been invariably been through indirect attacks on the problem - gender equality, education and such, though some states try direct approaches like making people ineligible for govt. jobs when they have more than 2 and so on. The next assumption on your part - of a linear growth in resource consumption - and an underlying assumption that we in America somehow have to do or can do anything about it. I only pointed out that, other countries have their own brainpower working on the problem too. The impact of these efforts my be small, just like the efforts of environmentalists in the US, but they have lobbied for converting all diesel buses in New Delhi to LNG for example, this is a big deal as there are probably more that 20K buses doing 500 km per day, or it could take the form of mandating every building to have its own well and rain water harvesting system, as it has been done in Chennai. There is a small but growing movement that is questioning the meaning of 'modern-ness', in farming, use of building materials, water and sewage systems and so on. The second fact is that - of America's high consumption of resources, energy use is where the gap is really significant with most of it going for heating and transportation. By this I mean a cup of coffee is a cup of coffee even though it might be a $3 starbucks in the US. In both China and India the countries are not designed around the automobile, People's lives are a lot more local, and going 10 miles would be a long trip for rural folks, the cities rely on public transportation, the weather is hot. So rates of consumption are unlikely to reach US or European levels. Much of China's industrial usage is a displacement - ie manufacturing has moved from the US Japan etc to China. So easy with the 'if 1 Billion people jump up at the same time' analogy. Finally regarding 87% of population growth in the US being due to immigration -- Does anyone expect any other result, if most immigrants are in their 20's and 30's? Well America cannot expect Mexico, India, or some other country to raise millions of healthy folks and to give them up for free when they are 25 without there being some cost to the US. Suffice it to say that this just highlights the flaws in the overall system of identifying costs. There is no cost recognized for tailpipe emmissions, filling up landfills, trashing a small town with job losses etc. just as there is insufficient value attached to wellness programs, stay at home moms, absence of PCB's etc etc. If want the good news, it is probably blowing in the wind - In Germany I thought I read that a huge % of new energy capacity added is wind energy. You can google it for yourself. It is all due to thoughtful policy of providing a guaranteed market at stable prices. It recognized the need to socialize the cost of CO2 emmissions, instead of calling for a subsidy for wind energy. This more or less amounts to the same thing, but how you characterize it makes it easy to integrate within the economic system, and gives it a momentum of its own.