Scandinavia, the U.S. and the environment (guess who's not on top)

[Taxman]

Since it seems nobody got a chance to check this out when I first posted it, I thought I'd do so again in case some might find it interesting. The following are links to a site run by the world economic forum, which compiled a list of countries and their relative rankings for "environmental sustainability" a numeric figure that combines information on various levels of environmental practices:

About the list (http://www.weforum.org/site/homepublic.nsf/Content/Finland+Ranks+Highest+in+Environmental+Index,+US+L ags)

The list (http://www.ciesin.columbia.edu/indicators/ESI/rank.html)

Careful perusal will reveal that not only is the U.S. is ranked a mere 45th, but the list is topped by a number of scandinavian countries (which are socialist states of course) and Canada (Uruguay is #6 believe it or not). The results suggest that GDP does not necessarily have much to do with environmental sustainability. On the U.S., the page states:

"The United States’ performance is uneven. The US lags in controlling greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change and under-performs its peers in reducing waste. Yet, the US stands at the forefront of the world in controlling water pollution and promoting robust environmental policy debates."

Seems we are a mixed blessing on the world's enviromental health.

[adios]

[ QUOTE ]
but the list is topped by a number of scandinavian countries (which are socialist states of course)

[/ QUOTE ]

Description of Finnish Economy (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/fi.html#Econ)

Caps and italics are my own:
Economy - overview:
Finland has a highly industrialized, LARGELY FREE-MARKET ECONOMY, with per capita output roughly that of the UK, France, Germany, and Italy. Its key economic sector is manufacturing - principally the wood, metals, engineering, telecommunications, and electronics industries. Trade is important, with exports equaling almost one-third of GDP. Except for timber and several minerals, Finland depends on imports of raw materials, energy, and some components for manufactured goods. Because of the climate, agricultural development is limited to maintaining self-sufficiency in basic products. Forestry, an important export earner, provides a secondary occupation for the rural population. Rapidly increasing integration with Western Europe - Finland was one of the 11 countries joining the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) on 1 January 1999 - will dominate the economic picture over the next several years. Growth in 2003 was held back by the global slowdown but will pick up in 2004 provided the world economy suffers no further blows

HeeHaw

[adios]

I know I'm wasting my time but hey it's my time. As is typical of some this report is posted as if it were some sort of gospel. It doesn't even given any information as to how the index is calculated which is bad form but typical. Here's an article that basically states that the ESI is bunk. An excerpt:

But the premises of IPAT are demonstrably false. Economists have found that for almost all pollutants, environmental quality will worsen with economic growth until per capita income reaches $3,000-$9,000 (depending on the pollutant), at which point environmental quality will improve with further growth. Technology can cut either for or against the environment, but environmental improvements in the 20th century suggest that "for" is much likelier. Population has proven no constraint on environmental quality.

Greens, however, will hold on to the IPAT formula like grim death. A typical result is the "Environmental Sustainability Index," devised by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with Yale and Columbia universities. This index ranks each nation's "sustainability" according to 68 metrics -- fewer than half of which have any bearing on environmental quality or resource availability. Typical questions include: How many cars are in circulation? How many agricultural chemicals are employed? How much seafood do people eat? How many organized environmental groups are there, and how large are their memberships? How willing are domestic companies to join international environmental coalitions? How much land does the government own? How many international treaties has it signed?

The results are bizarre. If we posit that a more sustainable country is preferable to a less sustainable country, then Americans (living in a country with an "environmental sustainability index" of 53.2) ought to be clamoring to move to Botswana (61.8), Slovenia (58.8), Albania (57.9), Paraguay (57.8), Namibia (57.4), Laos (56.2), Gabon (54.9), Armenia (54.8), Moldova (54.5), Congo (54.3), Mongolia (54.2), or even the Central African Republic (54.1).

This study that is purported to be the end all regarding whose damaging the environment seems like another BS UN study.

Greeniacs in Jo-burg: The U.N.'s latest 'earth summit' (http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1282/17_54/90888289/p1/article.jhtml?term=)

Greeniacs in Jo-burg: The U.N.'s latest 'earth summit'.
National Review, Sept 16, 2002, by Jerry Taylor

'A great tragedy is fast unfolding," intones Gus Speth, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and one of the most respected figures in American environmentalism. "More than 20 years ago the alarm was sounded regarding threats to the global environment, but the environmental deterioration that stirred the international community then continues essentially unabated today." Population growth, affluence, and technology, Speth warns, are pushing us toward "a swift and appalling deterioration of the natural world. Only a response that in historical terms would be seen as revolutionary is likely to avert these changes."

As we prepare for the latest U.N. environmental carnival -- the "World Summit on Sustainable Development," to be held in Johannesburg over our Labor Day weekend -- despair is indeed warranted. No, not despair over the state of the planet. Despair over the state of the world's intellectual elite.

"Sustainable development" is widely defined as "that which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." It's essentially a call to maximize human welfare over time, although people seldom think of it this way. That's what economics is all about: Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations could fairly be called the world's first blueprint for sustainable development. Sustainable development, that is to say, is in the eye of the beholder.

There are some, of course, who would urge us to avoid any deterioration of the natural resource base. But the wealth created by exploiting resources is often more beneficial than the wealth preserved by "banking" those resources for future use. Is the world really a poorer place because past generations drew down stocks of oil, iron, and various other minerals and metals to make advanced satellites, modern industry, and -- through the wealth created thereby -- advanced medicines and hundreds of other life-enhancing technologies?

Other environmentalists allow that we must use some resources, but call for us to leave them above a minimum critical level and to pass down the wealth generated by resource use to future generations, who would otherwise be "robbed" of their rightful inheritance.

But consider: If the only way we could have preserved the American bison beyond a "minimum critical level" was by leaving the Great Plains largely untouched by agriculture, would the sacrifice of what was to become the world's most productive cropland been in either the economic or the social interest of future generations? Issued without due consideration of both costs and benefits, the admonition is anti-human.

Moreover, the claim that the proceeds of resource use must be preserved for future generations is redundant at best. Since all wealth is eventually inherited, there is simply no need for a special, state- supervised "account" to be established for the benefit of those to come.

Indeed, the radical improvements in standard of living, life expectancy, and resource availability attained by each succeeding generation since the Industrial Revolution show that we don't need the Greens to watch over our children. You can look it up: Agricultural production continues to outpace population growth. Global forests are on net expanding, not contracting. Resources of almost all kinds -- petroleum, natural gas, minerals, and foodstuffs -- are becoming more abundant no matter how one chooses to measure them. Air and water quality in the most advanced industrial nations is improving at a truly jaw-dropping pace, while improvements in even the poorest of the world's nations are demonstrably tied to levels of per capita income. The future, moreover, is even sunnier than the present. Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University calculates that, given trends in agricultural productivity, an area the size of the Amazon basin will likely be returned to nature by 2070. Innovations in timber harvesting suggest that 10 percent of the world's forests will produce all our commercial needs by 2050. Advances in fisheries management promise a boom in marine productivity and a corresponding recovery of commercially valuable fish stocks. Growth in per capita income will improve the quality of both our air and our water. Man's "footprint" on the planet is becoming both softer and smaller.

Yet the Green mentality seems impervious to such facts, no matter how high the data are piled. My late colleague Julian Simon demonstrated this quite nicely at a forum some years ago. He began by asking, "How many of you think that pollution is in general getting worse and that resources are on the brink of exhaustion?" Nearly every hand in the audience went up. Then he asked, "What sort of evidence would you need to change your opinion?" No hands. "Is there anything that could change your mind -- anything at all?" Again, nothing. "Well," he said, "let me apologize then. I'm not dressed for church."

If the data are so clearly pointing in the right direction, what are we to make of the various stylized sustainability indices, regularly trotted out by the media, suggesting that doom is around the corner? In a word, they're cooked.

Consider the "IPAT Identity." Introduced by Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, it postulates that Environmental Impact (I) = Population (P) x Affluence (A) x Technology (T).

But the premises of IPAT are demonstrably false. Economists have found that for almost all pollutants, environmental quality will worsen with economic growth until per capita income reaches $3,000-$9,000 (depending on the pollutant), at which point environmental quality will improve with further growth. Technology can cut either for or against the environment, but environmental improvements in the 20th century suggest that "for" is much likelier. Population has proven no constraint on environmental quality.

Greens, however, will hold on to the IPAT formula like grim death. A typical result is the "Environmental Sustainability Index," devised by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with Yale and Columbia universities. This index ranks each nation's "sustainability" according to 68 metrics -- fewer than half of which have any bearing on environmental quality or resource availability. Typical questions include: How many cars are in circulation? How many agricultural chemicals are employed? How much seafood do people eat? How many organized environmental groups are there, and how large are their memberships? How willing are domestic companies to join international environmental coalitions? How much land does the government own? How many international treaties has it signed?

The results are bizarre. If we posit that a more sustainable country is preferable to a less sustainable country, then Americans (living in a country with an "environmental sustainability index" of 53.2) ought to be clamoring to move to Botswana (61.8), Slovenia (58.8), Albania (57.9), Paraguay (57.8), Namibia (57.4), Laos (56.2), Gabon (54.9), Armenia (54.8), Moldova (54.5), Congo (54.3), Mongolia (54.2), or even the Central African Republic (54.1).

Other studies purport to measure our "ecological footprint" by assessing mankind's total demand on the planet against the supply of resources the planet has to provide. The World Wildlife Fund recently reported, for instance, that we are harvesting 20 percent more of the planet's resources than can be regenerated in a year and that we'll need to colonize two additional planets by 2050 if this continues. The media, predictably, went wild.

But if resources are indeed becoming scarce, shouldn't prices for those resources be going up? In fact, they're going down.

The study warns in particular that the amount of land we need to produce energy has doubled over 40 years -- hence the dramatic warning that space colonization is necessary unless we cease and desist.

What the authors calculated, however, was not how much land was being used to produce oil, gas, and coal (which is, in fact, trivial), but how much forestland was necessary to absorb the carbon dioxide generated by fossil-fuel consumption. Only by the wildest stretch of the imagination can one discern a human "footprint" on the wild and uninhabited forests that suck up carbon dioxide. If anything, those emissions are contributing to forest health by fertilizing them mightily -- an argument that has been convincingly made by Sylvan Wittwer, former chairman of the National Research Council's Board on Agriculture. Moreover, this human "use" of forests as carbon sinks does not preclude any other ecological or economic use of forestland resources.

Why do otherwise intelligent and well-educated people rush to crowd the pews in Johannesburg? For the same reason that otherwise intelligent and well-educated scientists in the Islamic world publish papers in peer-reviewed journals describing technologies to harness energy from Koranic djinni. Both are gripped by religious fervor, and scientific facts get left by the way.

COPYRIGHT 2002 National Review, Inc.

HeeHaw

[Taxman]

Yes Finland is not nearly as socialist as Norway, Sweden or Canada, but the fact that 3 out of 4 are socialist countries is intersting.

HawHee

[Taxman]

I know I'm wasting my time, but I never presented this as the end all. You bitch and moan that I don't provide enough sources then complain that my source doesn't completely end the discussion, which obviously it doesn't because no source really can. It still proves however, that the US is a fair distance from the forefront of environmental sustainability, which was my only motive for posting the link. You provide some partisan sources of your own (mine's not even that partisan considering it was a world study. The list wasn't trying to do anything but compare the relative impact various countries have on the environment and see how that related to other things like GDP) and tell me that this doesn't prove everything. You seem to think that a country must be a first world paradise to have a low envirnomental impact, which is ridiculous. Some countries are not even developed enough to pollute anywhere near the level we can. Does that mean we should all go move to them? Of course not. Your source's argument is absurd and illogical. You however really are proving to be one superior mind. I bow to you.

[stinkypete]

[ QUOTE ]
Yes Finland is not nearly as socialist as Norway, Sweden or Canada, but the fact that 3 out of 4 are socialist countries is intersting.

HawHee

[/ QUOTE ]

finland not as socialist as canada? HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA

okay, i'm done now.

[vulturesrow]

Taxman,

I think the point of the article that adios posted is that ESI that you posted is somewhat dubious in the metrics it uses and such. It was an interesting read but I just dont completely buy it. Thanks for posting it though.

[jcx]

These lists are always amusing. Be it quality of life, environmental issues, yadda yadda, Scandinavia just has it all over the rest of the world. As far as "Environmental Sustainibility" goes, this is a pretty easy contest to win when most of the area is a wasteland (albeit a beautiful one) from a farming & ranching standpoint, due to its poor soil. Canada has millions of acres of frozen tundra to make up for its industrial and agricultural areas. The Scandinavians may be living in a pristine environment, but without the ability to import food, I hope you like herring and knawing on whale blubber.

[Cyrus]

This instictive suspicion, if not outright dismissal, of everything the government does or says can be quite healthy - and it can be quite stupid. Can you see why? Because thinking should not be instictive. It's a contradiction in terms.

To wit, a great number of things can only be done collectively, as opposed to individually, in society. In the process of collective action, some (perceived or tangible) individual freedoms will get restricted. The holy grail here is to have a balance between the quest for liberty and the quest for equality. (The latter, some of you might be surprised to know, is not some artificial construct of 18th century French philosophers in white wigs but a strong human trait. As evidenced, inter alia, by the work of Tversky et al.)

As to Finland and its brand of economy, suffice to say that if ever the United States was to adopt Finnish policies on the environment (or taxation, medicare, education, family) you would run for the hills, arm in hand, to fight against the new socialist regime! Believe you me.

In matters of the environment, only collective action can do the work. It goes without saying that this collective action must be supported by a democratic society, otherwise it is a phony collective action, as evidenced by the environmental hellhole that was (is) the old USSR.


The best things in life are free (http://www.ciesin.columbia.edu/indicators/ESI/rank.html)

[Cyrus]

"Most of the area [of Scandinavia] is a wasteland (albeit a beautiful one) from a farming & ranching standpoint, due to its poor soil. The Scandinavians may be living in a pristine environment, but without the ability to import food, I hope you like herring and knawing on whale blubber."

Perhaps your intention is to point out the supremacy of American-style capitalism over Scandinacian-style social-democratic economies. But even in the pursuit of such noble goals (I'm just sayin'..), a gross distortion of facts is uncalled for.

Here's what the CIA (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/) has to say :

Norway is a big oil driller and producer. The country has a big industrial base in petroleum and gas, food processing, shipbuilding, pulp and paper products, metals, chemicals, timber, mining, textiles, and of course fishing. Most of those products are exported too. A wide variety of foodstuff is, of course, naturally available, and is also imported (including junk food).

Sweden has achieved an enviable standard of living under a mixed system of high-tech capitalism and extensive welfare benefits. It has a modern distribution system, excellent internal and external communications, and a skilled labor force. Economy heavily oriented toward foreign trade. Privately owned firms account for about 90% of industrial output. Again, food is healthy, as evidenced by food-related health stats, while some food is also imported, such as junk food, beloved by American tourists.

Finally Finland is not the paradise you hate her for! The country suffers from air pollution caused by manufacturing and power plants contributing to acid rain. And water pollution from industrial wastes and agricultural chemicals. (Happy now?)

But Finland is doing well gastronomically, no matter what you have been led to believe! Salmon, reindeer or willow grouse are to be found on your table, if you can drag your behind from the local McDonalds. But did you know that Finland is considered the world leader in the development of functional or health-enhancing foods? It's the Silicon Valley of functional foods, exporting millions of dollars worth of them.

...Oh, well. Back to chomping the old big mac. /images/graemlins/cool.gif

[ThaSaltCracka]

where the hell did this come from? someone must have been bored.......
BTW, Taxman I have been meaning to say, welcome back, you took a quite a break from the boards.

[Koller]

Finland 73.9....USA 53.2

social- democratic economy 73.9....Hard line capitalism 53.2

[vulturesrow]

I was pretty bored last night so I actually read through all the ESI stuff. Some of the metrics that they use to measure ecnomic sustainibility are borderline ridiculous, at least in my opinion. I encourage people to download the reports and see what they think for themselves before blindly accepting the results of this index.

As an aside, it is very difficult to have any sort of environmental policy in a society with a poor economy. Why is that? In essence, concern for the environment is a luxury good. So it follows that a society with a strong economy is one that can afford to use a percentage of their income to protect the environment. This is Economics 101 here. So the fact that ESI folks are suggesting that their is no correlation between GDP and environmental quality, is on its face ridiculous.

[superleeds]

So when the earth starts to sink in it's own [censored] you'll be able to point fingers and carry on the great American tradition - It's not my fault.