Economic Development is Killing the World
by John Lawrence, December 10, 2018
How ironic! It's not war that is killing the planet. It's economic development - mainly in India and China. The thing Americans laud most and elect Presidents for is actually responsible for the acceleration of the injection of greenhouse gasses into the environment. The Paris accords, which Trump has now rejected, was an attempt to get the whole world together, not to drink a Coke, but to reduce greenhouse gasses and to reduce the possibility of runaway global warming which threatens to doom the planet. However, despite good intentions, which notoriously is what the road to Hell are paved with, economic development in India and China require more and more burning of coal in power plants which then spew out their gasses into the atmosphere. The good news is that practically no one in China lives in utter poverty any more. The bad news is that this is killing the planet.
Let's face it kids. Everyone in the wide world wants to live like Americans with their high consumption lifestyle. Everyone wants goods and services nonpareil. The US has even encouraged all the world's people to emulate us and consume, consume, consume. It's good for the economy. More consumption, profits go up. Wall Street is happy. More businesses expanding moving more and more product. The only problem is that all this economic development worldwide is dooming the planet. We are already seeing Pacific islands disappearing. We are already seeing sunny day flooding in Miami. We are already seeing crop failures in the Middle East. We are already seeing economic refugees.
All of this is happening because of the conflicting goals of economic development and living sustainably so that future generations have a viable planet to live on. Elon Musk might be taking off in a spaceship for Mars, but, unfortunately for the rest of us, Planet Earth is all we have right now and will have for the foreseeable future. The only question is will Planet Earth be habitable in a few years. Note that we don't have a century to fix this problem which, at the rate we are going in converting to renewable energy, is what it will take to get to zero emissions. Some experts predict that the worst effects of global warming will be out of control in a decade. Then the polar ice caps will be melted and New York City, London, Tokyo and Miami will be under water. The evolutionary experiment which resulted in the human species will end up in a failure. The bugs and microbes will have to take over until another advanced species has time (many millennia) to evolve. Hopefully, this new species will be less war like and more willing to share the planet in a sustainable way. Then Earth, many millenia from now, might be habitable again.
