United States
The Washington Post yesterday reported on another example of sub-national governmental action on climate change (seen also at the state/province level).
Some 522 mayors representing 65 million Americans have signed a climate change agreement in the face of federal foot-dragging on the issue.
One driver: a third of Americans in an April poll now say that climate change is the world’s most serious environmental problem, double the number from 2006, the Post reports.
City-level action is particularly striking given that climate change is a global issue, beyond the reach of even national governments to manage on their own.
In a further sign that the United States may shift its stance on climate change, a Washington Post poll reveals widespread concern about the phenomenon:
- 70% of Americans want the federal government to do more about global warming, with 49% saying “much more”
- 33% say that global warming is the world’s “single biggest environmental problem,” up from 16% a year ago
- 59% trust the Democrats more than President Bush on the issue
The WP reported today that the leaders of California (an American state) and British Columbia (a Canadian province) are discussing cooperation in alternative energy and climate change initiatives, with BC talking about pursuing ambitious green goals.
This is interesting from a couple of angles:
- It is an example of regions having more in common across borders than within them — evocative of the “Nine Nations of North America” concept.
- It reinforces the concept that the US and now perhaps Canada will be led forward on certain environmental issues by sub-national units. As the premier of BC put it, “If you wait for a whole continent to come along together, sometimes it takes too long.”
Recent articles highlight a potentially dangerous combination.
US cities and states are increasingly pursuing anti-immigrant measures, enforcing federal laws and checking immigration status in the course of other police business.
These measures are targeted against growing Hispanic immigrant populations, and are clearly motivated in part by a basic hostility toward difference.
Widespread adoption of these policies might in fact discourage immigration, but also heightens the danger of creating a separate and hostile foreign population on American soil.
That danger could be made more acute by another development, now in its early stages: Hispanics are turning to Islam in growing numbers. The Muslim Hispanic population is estimated to be 200,000 now.
More alienated Hispanics could find the extreme ends of Islamic fundamentalism attractive, and serve as an American vector for terrorism.
Though still a low-probability outcome, the two trends might achieve a dangerous synergy.
The NYT reports on a pattern of harassment and mistreatment of American Muslims at airports and borders. For instance:
Taleb Salhab and his wife say they too were dragged away in handcuffs at the border crossing in Port Huron, Mich., as their two preschool daughters wailed in the back seat of their car. The Salhabs were discharged after four hours of questioning, with no explanation from customs officers.
A significant problem is the watch list of suspicious names: bizarrely, it is merely a list of names, not a list of people, and so innocent citizens and travelers are continually flagged as being “on the list.” For Muslims, who have a relatively small pool of names, the problem is particularly acute.
Most of those wrongly placed on the watch list seethe with frustration and anger, finding it unbelievable that a technologically advanced country like the United States has been unable to develop a list that can distinguish between a lurking terrorist and a harmless citizen with a Muslim name.
Treating Muslim immigrants like they are potential enemies, and abusing them in the process, is an excellent recipe for ending up in the situation of France or Britain: threatened by a hostile group of Islamic extremists embedded in the society which could have embraced them.
(In a different sphere, the same principle applies to the larger immigration debate. It is mostly about Hispanic immigration, and the anti-immigrant forces who would personalize the policy problem — harassing or arresting individual immigrants — risk bringing about the very situation they fear: an alienated and numerous minority adjacent to an alternate homeland. This would be a long time developing, but is not unimaginable.)
The June 2006 Scientific American notes the 50th anniversary of the resignation of Trofim Lysenko from his position overseeing the Soviet Union’s agricultural science.
Lysenko famously set back Soviet science by rejecting Mendelian genetics — the science of genetics — in favor of the idea that organisms could acquire characteristics during their lifetimes, as the latter was seen as more compatible with Soviet Marxism and its pursuit of the new human.
Real damage was done; Soviet farms apparently did not even plant ideologically incorrect hybrid corn until Lysenko was out of the way.
Holden Thorpe points out in “Evolution’s Bottom Line” in the NYT that creationists could do similar harm in the United States.
Creationism, he notes, has no commercial applications, while evolution does. An understanding of evolutionary relationships enables us to use animal genomes to study human health problems, and the knowledge that evolution continues equips us to fight deadly antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Humans and bacteria share many genes, making antibacterial treatments trickier; Thorp suggests that most people would rather use antibiotics developed by someone who understood how this sharing came to be, rather than by a Biblical literalist ignorant of this relationship.
How will American students, and American competitiveness, fare when American kids are learning an ideologically distorted version of science, while Indians and Chinese students are learning the real thing, Thorp asks?
The Soviet Union suffered when ideologues suppressed science that disturbed their religious world view; the United States will suffer if the same thing occurs here.
The CSM examines a collision of issues that many find disturbing: high rates of immigration to the United States are at odds with many aspects of environmental preservation.
As an environmentalist puts it, “Immigration is one of the leading contributors to population growth. All we’re saying is, those numbers should be reduced to achieve population stabilization.”
The article also reports some intriguing findings that suggest that immigrant women’s fertility actually rises when they come the US, further amplifying the impact of their increased wealth on the world’s environment.
How a society balances immigration and the environment is a matter of priorities and values, but environmentalists should at least take note that reducing immigrant inflows might prevent a lot more pollution and sprawl than most other “green” policies.
The Economist Intelligence Unit released its 2006 e-readiness rankings yesterday. The index is a measure of a country’s readiness for e-business, judged by Internet access, broadband penetration, innovation, information security, and other factors. More telling than the ranking is the country’s distance from a score of 10.
The ratings are a good indicator of general abilities in IT, and thus an important component of present and future competitiveness.
The top countries
Rank. Country — score out of 10 (2005 rank)
1. Denmark — 9.00 (1)
2. US — 8.88 (2)
3. Switzerland — 8.81 (4)
4. Sweden — 8.74 (3)
5. UK — 8.64 (5)
6. Netherlands — 8.60 (8)
7. Finland — 8.55 (6)
8. Australia — 8.50 (10)
9. Canada — 8.37 (12)
10. Hong Kong — 8.36 (6)
11. Norway — 8.35 (9)
12. Germany — 8.34 (12)
13. Singapore — 8.24 (11)
14. New Zealand — 8.19 (16)
14. Austria — 8.19 (14)
16. Ireland — 8.09 (15)
17. Belgium — 7.99 (17)
18. South Korea — 7.90 (18)
19. France — 7.86 (19)
Other countries of interest
Rank. Country — score out of 10 (2005 rank)
21. Japan — 7.77 (21)
22. Israel — 7.59 (20)
23. Taiwan — 7.51 (22)
25. Italy — 7.14 (24)
30. United Arab Emirates — 6.32 (X)
31. Chile — 6.19 (31)
35. South Africa — 5.74 (32)
37. Malaysia — 5.60 (35)
39. Mexico — 5.30 (36)
41. Brazil — 5.29 (38)
42. Argentina — 5.27 (39)
45. Turkey — 4.77 (43)
46. Saudi Arabia — 4.67 (46)
48. Venezuela — 4.47 (45)
49. Romania — 4.44 (47)
51. Colombia — 4.41 (48)
52. Russia — 4.30 (52)
53. India — 4.25 (49)
55. Egypt — 4.14 (53)
56. Philippines — 4.04 (51)
57. China — 4.02 (54)
60. Nigeria — 3.69 (58)
61. Ukraine — 3.62 (57)
62. Indonesia — 3.39 (60)
64. Kazakhstan — 3.22 (62)
65. Iran — 3.15 (59)
67. Pakistan — 3.03 (64)
Regional standouts in the developing world are Chile, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates. The low scores of some countries, notably India, China, and Russia, disguise significant specialized capabilities in infotech.
PriceWaterhouseCoopers has released a study of potential growth in the world’s 17 largest economies out to the year 2050.
The study forecasts the eclipse of the current developed economies. The E7, largest emerging market economies (China, India, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey), were only 20% of the size of the G7 economies at market exchange rates in 2005, but would be 25% larger than the G7 by 2050. By purchasing power, the E7 economies were only 75% as large as the G7 in 2005, but would be 75% larger by 2050.
In purchasing power terms, the shifts in relative GDP would be stark:
COUNTRY — relative econ size 2005 / 2050
US — 100 / 100
Japan — 32 / 23
Germany — 20 / 15
China — 76 / 143
UK — 16 / 15
France — 15 / 13
Italy — 14 / 10
Spain — 9 / 8
Canada — 9 / 9
India — 30 / 100
South Korea — 9 / 8
Mexico — 9 / 17
Australia — 5 / 6
Brazil — 13 / 25
Russia — 12 / 14
Turkey — 5 / 10
Indonesia — 7 / 19
Note that the values are relative within their respective years, but not across them; all economies are projected to be larger in 2050 than at present.
Purchasing power suggests, among other things, the military power the economy can afford to buy, suggesting that the realignment of power toward Asia will have substantially occurred. It will no longer be possible for the US to massively outspend all potential rivals.
The study also offers some startling numbers for per capita income. The figures suggest that the developed countries could have universal prosperity, and the emerging markets could achieve levels of wealth like those of developed countries today, eliminating dire poverty.
COUNTRY — 2005 / 2050 purchasing power GDP per capita (constant 2004 dollars)
US — $40,339 / $88,443
Japan — $30,081 / $70,646
Germany — $28,770 / $68,261
China — $6,949 / $35,851
UK — $31,489 / $75,855
France — $29,674 / $74,685
Italy — $28,576 / $66,165
Spain — $25,283 / $66,552
Canada — $31,874 / $75,425
India — $3,224 / $21,872
South Korea — $21,434 / $66,489
Mexico — $9,939 / $42,879
Australia — $31,109 / $74,000
Brazil — $8,311 / $34,448
Russia — $10,358 / $43,586
Turkey — $7,920 / $35,861
Indonesia — $3,702 / $23,686
These numbers suggest massive value shifts: countries reaching these wealth levels have shifted toward democracy, social freedom, and humane governance.
There is an underlying problem in these hopeful figures: sustainability will be strained with far more of the planet living at developed levels of wealth.