How much environmental damage is occurring thanks to American arrogance?
The facts are in and it's not pretty:
"The United States constitutes 4 per cent of the world population. It is responsible for a quarter of all carbon dioxide emissions - an average of 40,000 pounds of carbon dioxide is released by each US citizen every year - the highest of any country in the world, and more than China, India and Japan combined."
Official propaganda suggests something else entirely. Naturally, of course.
The facts are in and it's not pretty:
"The United States constitutes 4 per cent of the world population. It is responsible for a quarter of all carbon dioxide emissions - an average of 40,000 pounds of carbon dioxide is released by each US citizen every year - the highest of any country in the world, and more than China, India and Japan combined."
Official propaganda suggests something else entirely. Naturally, of course.
3 Comments:
How much of the world's agriculture? Industrial production? Intellectual creativity? R&D into technology, medicine, and a million other things that make peoples' lives better around the world?
You really need help, Ant, if you're so obsessed with America and Israel as the font of all evil in the world. If China ever becomes a 'superpower' (granted, a doubtful proposition), you'll realize the world never had it so good.
Indeed -- this is such a bass-ackwards first-year uni student way of looking at the world.
The US population is 295 million; their annual GDP is something like 11.75 trillion US $, according to the CIA Factbook.
The combined population of China, India and Japan (three very different nations, to be sure), comes in at around 1.4 - 1.5 billion people, again using the same CIA Factbook figures. Their total GDP, with five times as many people (and one-and-a-half economic powerhouses in the mix), comes in at only $14.326 trillion.
In other words, for all their (yawn) terrible polluting ways, the United States is also producing so much more than any one else, and those benefits flow on through the international economy. That $11.75 trillion ain't all staying Stateside, you know.
To look at it another way, three countries with five times the people only generate a GDP that's $2.5 trillion, a mere fraction, greater than that of the United States.
Why would this be so? Japan does alright, with a GDP of 3.745 trillion and a population of 127 million, but India and China are in their own ways basket-cases, thanks to communism (the latter) and terribly destructive experiments in post-colonial socialism (the former).
Ant, I don't mean to sound like Ayn Rand here (and sure has hell don't want to look like her!) but have you ever considered what the world would be like if the US economy just packed up and shut down? I'd be much more interested in getting China and India's economies up to Japan-U.S. levels, then maybe they could be more like the United States, where despite all the CO2 emmissions, people enjoy clean water, health, sanitation, hygiene and environments far cleaner than anything all but the richest in India and China can experience. The richer a country gets, the cleaner it's environment gets, because people both can demand and afford it. Whining about corporate colonialism ain't gonna make it so.
"The facts are in and it's [sic] not pretty." LOL
Tony, your lackluster grammatical skills are a helluva lot uglier than the greenie cant against the United States that you cite.
You deem a White House press release to be "propaganda." But you credit an equally political statement from the Lefty lobbying group "Common Dreams" to be the gospel truth. Glad to see that you're so open-minded and unbiased.
You are in dire need of a read of Bjorn Lomborg's "The Sceptical Environmentalist" in which that Danish academic and reformed Greenpeace member skewers the Chicken Little falsehoods and distortions that are peddled by the enviro movement.
Your politics are as ill-formed as your comprehension of basic syntax.
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