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Impacts- Econ Good- A2: Environment
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- Impacts- Econ Good- A2: Environment
Impacts- Econ Good- A2: EnvironmentThe Environment is improving- won’t happen Hayward 3 (Stephan F. Senior Fellow, Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 1992-present , 03, “Lomborg Gets the Galileo Treatment”, http://www.aei.org/outlook/15242, CH) I was provoked," Lomborg explains. "I had never really questioned my belief in an ever deteriorating environment--and here was Simon, telling me to put my beliefs under the statistical microscope." Being a professor of statistics, he made a class project of checking the data and refuting Simon. But a funny thing happened on the way to debunking Simon: "Not everything he said was correct but--contrary to our expectations--it turned out that a surprisingly large amount of his points stood up to scrutiny and conflicted with what we believed ourselves to know." Thus chastened, Lomborg set out in The Skeptical Environmentalist to refute what he calls the litany: We are all familiar with the Litany: the environment is in poor shape here in Earth. Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct in vast numbers--we kill off more than 40,000 each year. The forests are disappearing, fish stocks are collapsing and the coral reefs are dying. We are defiling our Earth, the fertile topsoil is disappearing; we are paving over nature, destroying the wilderness, decimating the biosphere, and will end up killing ourselves in the process. The world's ecosystem is breaking down. We are fast approaching the absolute limit of viability, and the limits of growth are becoming apparent.[2] "There is just one problem," Lomborg adds. The litany "does not seem to be backed up by the available evidence." The Skeptical Environmentalist reviews trend data, primarily from UN or other government sources, for hundreds of environmental variables and finds that most aspects of the world's environment are either improving or are not catastrophic as the public imagines. Lomborg quickly adds that he is not saying that the environment is fine, that there is no cause for worry, or that civilization should be content with the current state of things. The point of assessing and comparing various environmental trends is to help policymakers set priorities among different environmental problems. "When things are improving," Lomborg writes, "we know we are on the right track. Although perhaps not at the right speed." Conversely, misleading perceptions lead to misallocation of resources, especially in wealthy countries.[3] As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found in an internal study more than a decade ago, funding priorities are often in inverse proportion to the seriousness of environmental problems. Economic growth prevents environmental destruction. Ben-Ami 6 (Daniel, Journalist with a Specialty in Economics, Editor of Fund Strategy, “Who’s afraid of economic growth?” May 4, 2006, http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CB04D.htm, AD: 7-6-9) BL The importance of economic growth to providing a better environment should be clear. As a general rule the environment in the developed world is far better for humans than in the poorer countries. For many people in the world, malnutrition, as well as a lack of clean water and modern sanitation, are key killers. In addition, the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that 1.6 million people a year - that is one person every 20 seconds - dies as a result of indoor air pollution. As WHO notes: 'More than half of the world's population rely on dung, wood, crop waste or coal to meet their most basic energy needs. Cooking and heating with such solid fuels on open fires or stoves without chimneys leads to indoor air pollution. This indoor smoke contains a range of health-damaging pollutants including small soot or dust particles that are able to penetrate deep into the lungs.' (24) Yet those of us lucky enough to live in the developed world do not need to cope with such problems. Since the overwhelming majority of us are connected to the electricity grid, gas mains or both, the scourge of indoor air pollution is not a killer. Economic development has played a key role in improving the environment for many millions of people, although many more could gain from its benefits in the future. Impacts- Econ Good- A2: EnvironmentZero growth prohibits the discovery of new resources or innovation - its ultimately unsustainable Florea 8 (Adrian, The Limits of Zero Economic Growth Strategy, University of Oradea, Faculty of Economics, http://imtuoradea.ro/auo.fmte/MIE_files/FLOREA%20ADRIAN%201.pdf) LE From the beginning the report entitled „The limits of growth” was the topic of some interesting disputes on the theme of the limited character of resources concluded in valuable studies which are even today serious supports for reflecting on the future. The studies „Catastrophe or a new society? A latino-amercian model of the world?”, Published by the Argentinean Bariloche Fundation having Amilcar Herrera as a coordinator and „Mankind at crossroads” by Mihailo Mesarovit and Eduard Pestel are just on example. These projects of world development vehemently criticized the discrepancy between the rich and the poor, the immorality of waste in the developed countries as compared to the great lack in the third world; underlined the annoying fact that „in the developed regions of world the material consumption reached the proportion of an absurd waste”, with all the consequences that come out. The above mentioned study draws attention on a real fact: the existent resources especially row materials and energy is limited. But from this realistic and necessary finding, to the suggestion of a solution of limiting the growth, the way was too easily chosen, evading intentionally or not the promising chance that the dimension of the known resources will be multiplied, on the basis of the new discoveries sustained by the new achievements of science and technics. And as if this had not been enough they didn’t take into account the possibility that known type of growth that alarmed through waste, to be changed with a rational one, based on another matrix of values, and on another technical way of production and consumption. We have to underline the fact that the project of zero growth was an attempt to suggest that any model of economical growth must be thought on the canons of logics, hidden of ideology. The attempt remained at a level of suggestion because on the whole they didn’t manage to prove that development can be part of social-political pattern. For instance when the society of future is proposed to be an egalitarian one, to allow the participation of all the countries in an equal way, in the advantages that can be obtained on international trade; it is easily observable that this statement contains a big amount of ideology. In spite of all this facts, we consider that the attempt had its role, mainly that of objectification of the analysis on a field of activity which is not negligible. On this open path the efforts of mathematical shaping and formalizing contributed once again to the growth of the scientific and objectivity level of a forming science like the environment economy. Even with zero growth we would still exhaust all resources Florea 8 (Adrian, The Limits of Zero Economic Growth Strategy, University of Oradea, Faculty of Economics, http://imtuoradea.ro/auo.fmte/MIE_files/FLOREA%20ADRIAN%201.pdf) LE Disasters of a serious gravity made the world realise that the nature is invaded with offals and that the old theories of the value, where only the work and the capital are considered main actors, does not provide a real explaining basis. Thus, the entropic value was born, which tells us, uncomfortably. That we are using resources from a finite deposit and that we do not replace them with others. In the same way the preoccupation for the economy of value imposed itself, moving the centre of the analysis from explaining the causes of the value, finite through its nature, to be reduced, with the maintaining of the quality of the product in which it is incorporated, “the tendency towards quality” and not quantity, to use a phrase preferred by Keynes, becomes an imperative because, as Paul Bran draws the attention, “[T]he law of the entropic value will not forgive us if we do not use the feeding of the Nature with services meant to reduce the pollution and to repair what we broke during the years of the ‘industrial unleash’, of the low entropy theft, theft followed, in many cases, by the ecological crime”. Therefore, the economy of value sends directly towards the reduction of the consumptions specific to raw materials and energy. In the conditions we know that the natural substance of the goods cannot be lowered bellow certain threshold, without questioning the existence of the product itself, it could be said that such a solution can only delay the moment of the resource exhaustion. And if the whole remains the same, we will get to its total consumption only later, engaging and exhausting decreasingly from its content, but we will get there. Download 0.75 Mb. Share with your friends:
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