1.Environmental protection should have priority over economic stability and progress? The debate question is very ackward. We need to strike a balance between environmental and economic benefits. Problem is that this balance is specific to each situation. You cannot build a chemical plant near a large city b/c population will suffer from pollution. But it makes perfect sense to build it in the desert where nobody will be affected.In reality, this analysis is done mathematically, and debate is about numbers that are used as inputs. In your "abstract" debate, you can make following points: - For developing countries and low-income people, economic benefits matter more than environmental ones. Nobody cares about blue sky if they can't get enough to eat. Further, it is immoral for us to enjoy blue sky if the price is starving children in China.
economic development a priority because they have to support their growing populations. Developing countries must address current problems; they cannot afford to worry about the distant future. They also point out that as First World countries are most to blame for current environmental damage, it is unfair to demand that developing nations limit their own growth to solve these problems. Arguments Pros Cons Taking care of millions of people who are starving is more important than saving natural resources, most of which are renewable anyway. We cannot expect developing nations to share the green concerns of developed countries when they are faced with dire poverty and a constant battle for survival.
We have already wasted and destroyed vast amounts of natural r esources, and in so doing have put earth at risk. We must preserve the earth for our children and grandchildren. In any case, poverty and environmental damage are often linked. Destroying the rainforest gives native peoples nowhere to go except urban slums. Polluted water can lead to crop failures. Climate change will turn fertile fields into desert and flood coastal areas where hundreds of millions live. Developing countries have to choose sustainable development if they want a future for their people.
The industrialised world·s emphasis on green issues holds back developing countries. Because this is seen as interference in their affairs, it also contributes to a greater divide between the First and Third worlds. Many also believe it is a deliberate attempt to stop possible economic competitors. After all, the USA and EU already put high tariffs (import taxes) on products made cheaply in developing countries (e.g. canned tomatoes, shoes) which could be sold in America or Europe. By limiting the development of profitable but polluting industries like steel or oil refineries we are forcing nations to remain economically backward.
No one wants to stop economic progress that could give millions better lives. But we must insist on sustainable development that combines environmental care, social justice and economic growth. Earth cannot support unrestricted growth. Companies in developed countries already have higher costs of production because of rules to protect the environment. It is unfair if they then see their prices undercut by goods produced cheaply in developing countries at the cost of great pollution.
Economic development is vital for meeting the basic needs of the growing populations of developing countries. If we do not allow them to industrialise, these nations will have to bring in measures to limit population growth just to preserve vital resources such as water.
Unchecked population growth has a negative impact on any nation, as well as on the whole planet. Both the poverty and the environmental problems of sub-Saharan Africa are largely the result of rapid population growth putting pressure on limited resources. At the same time China has become wealthy while following a ´one-childµ per couple policy. Limiting population growth will result in a higher standard of living and will preserve the environment.
Obviously the world would be better if all nations stuck to strict environmental rules. The reality is that for many nations such rules are not i n their interests. For example, closing China·s huge Capital Iron and Steelworks, a major source of pollution, would cost 40 000 jobs. The equal application of strict environmental policies would create huge barriers to economic progress, at a risk to political stability.
Nations are losing more from pollution than they are gaining from industrialisation. China is a perfect example. Twenty years of uncontrolled economic development have created serious, chronic air and water pollution. This has increased health problems and resulted in annual losses to farmers of crops worth billions of dollars. So uncontrolled growth is not only bad for the environment, it is also makes no economic sense.
Rapid industrialisation does not have to put more pressure on the environment. Scientific advances have made industries much less polluting. And developing countries can learn
Scientific progress has made people too confident in their abilities to control their environment. In just half a century the world·s nuclear industry has had at least three serious
- Environmental benefits will occur long time into the future, where people will have higher level of life than we do, so why should we suffer to make them even better off? It is like regretting that world economy recovered from Great Depression of 1920s b/c it caused global warming for us today. - Economic progress typically allows scientific progress, which means better ways of preserving the environment. We replaced wood with plastic, developed viable solar power, hybrid cars, house insulation, etc. - "Harmonious co-existence" of man and nature before industrial age is a myth. First, humans have been "destroying" the environment since early days when they hunted wooly mammoth and other large animals into extinction. Second, lack of economic growth means a limit on population growth, causes by high death rates from diseases and violence. Africa is a bright example. You could argue that Enviromental Protection, if truly a value to the consumer will be priced in to present market forces, giving companies that champion enviromental protection a competitive edge against those who do not. Therefore, the market sentiment shifts to accommodate the new demand, business practices will shift as well. A properly functioning economy is essential to the development of this new demand. Therefore, economic progress should be encouraged and maintained. Furthermore, the adjustments made to the economy to accommodate enviromental reforms deliver a cost to the economy that is not felt evenly through the market. Large, more established companies can bear the impact of environmental reform, whereas smaller companies, who operate with a small spread, cannot adopt these practices as rapidly. These transitions therefore have an impact not only on the vitality of these small companies, but also the workforce they employ; which at present 80% of the US workforce is comprised of small proprietorships. So it is both irresponsible and determinental to the economy, thereby the eventual success of these environmental laws, to apply these protectionist measures. As they are not properly priced into the market, they inevitably have a negative impact that spreads deep into the economy, affecting the society as a whole. In the end, the trees that were saved by the humans came at the cost of the humans. environmental problems"the most important problem facing this country today." Such results suggest that the environment is not a marginal concern for Americans, despite being seen as more of a future than current problem. The issue of economic growth versus environmental conservation can also be seen as developed countries vs developing ones. Industrial countries such as the USA and Germany have depended upon polluting industries for their wealth. Now they fear that uncontrolled economic development in the Third World will lead to environmental disaster. They point out that massive clearing of tropical rainforest for farming threatens biodiversity and may affect the global climate. At the same time relying upon heavy industry adds more pollution to the air, soil and water sources, while a richer population demands more energy, often produced from burning dirty fossil fuels such as coal. Developing countries such as China and Brazil point out that they must make industrialisation and
from the environmental mistakes of the accidents: Windscale (UK, 1957), Three developed world·s industrial Mile Island (USA, 1979), and Chernobyl revolution, and from more recent (USSR, 1986). In addition, the nuclear disasters in communist countries such power industry still cannot store its as China and the USSR. For example, waste safely. Hydro-power sounds efficient new steelworks use much less great but damming rivers is itself water, raw materials and power, while damaging to the environment. It also producing much less pollution than forces huge numbers of people off traditional factories. And nuclear their land ² as in China·s 3 Gorges generating plants can provide more project. energy than coal while contributing far less to global warming. We are also exploring alternative, renewable types of energy such as solar, wind and hydro-power. It is hypocritical (two-faced and unfair) for rich developed countries to demand that poorer nations make conservation their priority. After all, they became rich in the first place by destroying their environment in the industrial revolution. Now that they have cut down their own trees, polluted their water sources and poured billions of tons of carbon into the air, they are in no position to tell others to behave differently. In any case, as countries become richer they become more concerned about the environment, and can afford to do something about it. For developing countries conservation can therefore wait until they are richer.
Looking after our fragile world has to be a partnership. Climate change will affect the whole planet, not just the developed world. In fact it is likely to have particularly terrible effects on developing countries as sea levels rise, deserts advance, and natural disasters become more common. It is no use Europe trying to cut its emissions into the atmosphere if unchecked growth in China and India leads to much greater overall poll ution. Instead, developed countries need to transfer greener technologies to the developing world, paying for environmental protection and making sustainability a condition for aid.
The ´Green Revolutionµ has doubled the size of grain harvests. Thus, cutting down more forests to provide more space for crops is no longer necessary. We now have the knowledge to feed the world·s increasing population without harming the environment. Genetically modified crops can also benefit the developing world by requiring much less water, fertiliser or pesticide use while giving better yields. This is another example of economic development leading to environmental benefits.
The Green Revolution is threatening the biodiversity of the Third World by replacing native seeds with hybrids. We do not know what the lo ng-term environmental or economic consequences will be. We do know that in the short run, such hybrid crops can cause environmental problems by crowding out native plants and the wildlife which relies on them. The farmer growing hybrid crops must buy costly new seed every year because it cannot be saved to plant the following year·s crops. Farmers using hybrid seeds in what was the richest part of India went bankrupt. As a result, fertile lands lay idle and u nploughed, resulting in droughts and desertification.
Motions This House believes development trumps the environment This House believes that going green can wait until we can afford it This House believes that economic development should always take priority over environmental concerns in both the First and Third Worlds That economic growth, even at the expense of some environmental damage, is justified by the need to feed the rising world population
One of the biggest challenges facing governments as the new century unfolds is how to balance environmental protection with the demands of powerful multinational corporations. December 1999 Washington: If deterioration of the global environment over the past several decades is any guide, the coming century does not hold out much promise for reversing these trends, many environmentalists are warning as the millennium comes to a close.Rising Earth temperatures, record losses in biodiversity and species extinction, increasing demands and dwindling supplies of fresh water,
only seem to be getting worse.'If I look at the global environmental trends that we have been tracking since we first launched the Worldwatch Institute 25 years ago, and if I simply extrapolate these trends a few years into the next century, the outlook is alarming to say the least,' says Lester Brown, president of the Washington-based think-tank.On the up-side, the past several decades has seen citizens and environmental groups, or non-governmental organisations (NGOs), worldwide pulling together in unprecedented numbers to pressure governments to pass laws to protect the ozone layer, ban toxic chemicals in the environment, reduce air and water pollution, and protect endangered species and habitats.Seeking a balance between economic development and environmental protection, NGOs have played a major role in shaping international environmental treaties, including the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, and the Basel Convention, which bans exporting hazardous wastes from i ndustrialised nations to developing countries. Yet as the millennium pulls to a close, the political and financial structure of the world economy, which has become increasingly dominated by powerful multinational corporations, is directly at odds with efforts to promote a healthy Earth, says Joshua Karliner, executive director of the Transnational Resource and Action Centre, the San Francisco-based corporate watchdog.One clear example of this, says Karliner, has been the success of powerful multinational oil and gas industries in swaying the US Senate against ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, an international treaty seeking to reduce emissions of heat-trapping 'greenhouse' gases.Scientists believe that such emissions, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, will warm the Earth and result in drastic climate change, including increasing the intensity and frequency of floods, droughts, and storms.If current record-breaking warming trends continue, average global temperatures could rise between 1 and 3.5 degrees centigrade by the year 2050, according to expert studies.'The challenge in the 21st century is to replace the corporate-dominated paradigm that worships the bottom-line with a framework that puts the environment, human rights, and labour rights first,' says Karliner.
In the past several decades, NGOs have applied a diverse array of strategies to counter corporate power including promoting laws to protect the environment, developing lawsuits against governments and corporations, and passing company shareholder resolutions.Citizens in Ecuador, who see their own country's court systems as inadequate, for example, have been attempting to hold US oil giant Texaco accountable for its past operations, by suing the company in US courts. Similar suits have been filed in the US court system against UNOCAL and Chevron for their activities abroad.While praising these efforts, Peter Montague, director of the Maryland-based Environmental Research Foundation, says the environmental movement must pay closer attention to how the push for trade liberalisation is eroding the power of nation-states.'NGOs will become irrelevant if national governments lose their capacity to govern because power has been transferred to international trade bodies,' he says.After the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for example, a US firm complained that it had been illegally prevented from opening a waste disposal plant because of environmental zoning l aws in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi.Through NAFTA, Metalclad corporation sought some $90 million in damages since it said state authorities were - against trade rules - prohibiting it from making a profit since they declared the site an ecological zone and refused to allow the firm to reopen the facility.Similarly, many domestic environmental regulations - which NGOs have worked very hard to pass into law - have been challenged through the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and hence weakened or abolished, warn environmentalists.
The United States, for instance, gutted provisions of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Clean Air Act, and its Endangered Species Act after these environmental policies were challenged before the WTO, according to a recent report released by Public Citizen, a Washington-based NGO founded by consumer advocate Ralph Nader.'This undemocratic trend must be reversed and power must be returned to governments,' says Montague.Citizen groups and environmental organisations have been trying to guide global trade by
pressuring governments to attach environmental provisions to trade agreements and pressure international financial institutions like the World Bank, to adopt minimal environmental and social standards for funding projects.'In terms of reforms at the World Bank, I would say, depending on how you look at it, the glass is half empty or half full,' says Bruce Rich, senior attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund.While many destructive projects will not be funded by the Bank since environmentalists like Rich pressured the institution to adopt minimal guidelines, the Bank is still a large centralised institution which favours large loans - which often go toward large controversial energy projects, he says.
Some investment projects funded by global financial institutions 'are what is fuelling climate change and losses in biodiversity', says Rich.Using lessons from studying these institutions, environmental groups, including Indonesiabased Bioforum and Friends of the Earth Japan, have begun a new campaign to reform public export-credit lending agencies which operate without social and environmental standards.Designed to help a nation's firms compete for business abroad, these agencies provide publicly backed loans, guarantees and insurance to corporations seeking to do business in developing countries. 'These agencies are often financing projects - many riddled with corruption that other taxpayer-supported agencies like the World Bank reject as environmentally and economically unsustainable,' says Rich.Another challenge in the coming decades is genetic modification and environmentalists say they will keep a close watch on companies such as Novartis and Monsanto, which are heavily pushing their new technological innovations in biological engineering.'We are in the midst of a radical, historic transition - from the Industrial Age to the Biotechnical Age,' says Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Washington-based Foundation on Economic Trends in his book, The Biotech Century.
Environmental groups, including Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists, worry that the mass release of thousands of genetically engineered crops into the environment will cause 'super-weeds' through unintentional cross-breeding and hence irreversible damage to the Earth. Mass extinction of plant, animal and insect species will also be a trend environmentalists hope to reverse.John Tuxill, a researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, says that as critical habitat is logged or developed, extinction rates have accelerated this century to at least 1,000 species per year. 'These numbers indicate we now live in a time of mass extinction - a global evolutionary upheaval in the diversity and composition of life,' he says.'What we need now is a rapid shift in consciousness, a dawning awareness in people everywhere that we have to shift quickly to a sustainable economy if we want to avoid damaging our natural support systems beyond repair,' says the Institute's founder Lester Brown.Danny Kennedy, director of Project Underground, the California-based international mining watchdog, says for such a shift to happen, environmental organisations need to focus on organising people at the community level and working closely with other social movements, such as the human rights and civil rights movements.'The power of civil disobedience and mass movements has been harnessed and then forgotten at different points in the century,' he says. But the huge upcoming challenge, adds Karliner, will be to ensure that discontent with corporate-led globalisation is not captured by nationalist xenophobic responses such as the rise of right-wing militia groups in the United States, India's BJP party or France's Jean-Marie Le Pen.Instead, environmental and related movements need to work hard to harness the discontent with corporate power to promote democratic responses that value human rights and multi-racial and multi-ethnic responses to solving the problems.'We need to take the lessons learned from some of the horrors of the 20th century and apply them to building an alternative to globalisation in the 21st century,' says Karliner. Otherwise, he says, we may repeat some of the past centuries' more profound mistakes. - Third World Network Features/IPS
'As the recent controversy over the Seattle meeting of the WTO has shown, the issue of how trade liberalisation affects the environment remains highly contested and this book is therefore very timely. It provides an up-to-date summary of the debate over the links between trade and the environment and between economic growth and the environment, together with an excellent account of the post-war developments in international policy dealing with trade and environmental issues. Matthew Cole also provides an insightful empirical analysis of the links between growth and the environment, using a more extensive data set than earlier studies, and uses this analysis to assess the impact on the environment of the Uruguay Round of trade liberalisation. Drawing on this analysis he makes a number of proposals for how international agencies might better resolve disputes between trade liberalisation and environmental protection, addressing the issues currently on the agenda of the WTO. Written in a clear and non-technical style the book will be of benefit to policymakers and students wishing to understand the issues behind the current controversy. This book analyses and quantifies the environmental impact of two closely related phenomena: economic growth and the environment. Previous work in this area tends to address only the impact of trade or economic growth on the environment, yet, as M atthew Cole shows, the two are i nextricably linked. The issue of economic growth versus environmental conservation can also be seen as developed countries vs developing ones. Industrial countries such as the USA and Germany have depended upon polluting industries for their wealth. Now they fear that uncontrolled economic development in the Third World will lead to environmental disaster. They point out that massive clearing of tropical rainforest for farming threatens biodiversity and may affect the global climate. At the same time relying upon heavy industry adds more pollution to the air, soil and water sources, while a richer population demands more energy, often produced from burning dirty fossil fuels such as coal. Developing countries such as China and Brazil point out that they must make industrialisation and economic development a priority because they have to support their growing populations. Developing countries must address current problems; they cannot afford to worry about the distant future. They also point out that as First World countries are most to blame for current environmental damage, it is unfair to demand that developing nations limit their own growth to solve these problems. Developing countries just give priority to economic development,they don't ignore enviorenmental development.for example,china has a policy that says economics and enviorenment should be developed at the same time and in harmony. We need to pin down environmental externalities paid by society, that don not show up on balance sheets. Capitalism need not have a negative impact on the environment. In fact, quite the opposite. As an system, capitalism is all about forcing people to pay the cost of their actions. Thus, giving them incentives to conserve and find ways of utilizing resources more efficiently. However, natural resources (wood, oil, minerals, ecosystems) are not valued according to the function they are currently serving withing our biosphere. Their are capitalist overlay mechanisms to correct this to some degree, such as the Kyoto Protocol. Sometimes this mechanism is refereed to as the "cap-in-trade system." This will serve to place monetary value on negative industrial byproducts, which is a beginning for refining capitalism.As a system for orchestrating societal living peacefully, and as naturally as possible, capitalism is the most sophisticated systematic effort devised. We need to preserve its strengths and refine it loopholes. This requires viewing our economies as systems. Instead of viewing the components in isolation, seeing how they relate to the other components, and how all the components for the whole. Its called systems thinking. Its unwise to start judging the components of a system without acknowledging they are components of a system.Capitalism or the environment represents a false dichotomy. Capitalism is nothing but a word describing a gigantic incentive system. It sounds like the idea is that some of the incentives need re-thinking. One of the problems with capitalism is that of scale. See the incentive system induced production methods that raised the standard of living so much that the worlds populations have exponentially grown in the last hundred years. So using something like oil for the population of 1800s wasn't that big of a deal. But it enabled us to keep using our new found advantages to make more children. Just think "Baby Boomer's."
So on this scale, an oil infrastructure isn't sustainable.See its not the system as a whole that intrinsically harms the environment. Its how we respond to the system. A case can easily be build that proper balance between ourselves and our environment will never stick without an educated population. Business people are eco illiterate, and natural scientists are economically illiterate, and voters just want everything, without paying anything. Abraham Lincoln said: "A nation that wants to both be ignorant and free. Wants what never was, and never will be." We need to stop blaming systems that we know nothing about like capitalism and start re-thinking the way we live our lives. If we care, then its time to build up the knowledge and skills to be a part of the solution, not the problem. Because not all the resources are sustainable,we'd better not sacrifice the environment and waste up all the resources for the economic development. Now, it seems that we should weight the importance of economic development and environment. I would choose environment. I know that great economic development causes environmental disruption in the past times. So, from that experience, we should consider how we can develop economics with less affecting the environment. In this time, the economic rapidly grows in China, Brazil, but too rapid growth will distrupt environment. Now, it's the time we can seek for environmentally friendly development.
