“Do economic growth and environment conservation go together?” That was the old question asked by many generations. Logically, the answer tents to be “NO”, both from the personal business to the government policy maker point of view. In this small report, I will try to recognize, analyze environment problems and summarize some of the solutions for them.
Culture – Science – Technology - Term end report
“Economic growth and environment conservation”
Le Tien Anh
“Do economic growth and environment conservation go together?” That was the old question asked by many generations. Logically, the answer tents to be “NO”, both from the personal business to the government policy maker point of view. In this small report, I will try to recognize, analyze environment problems and summarize some of the solutions for them.
What can be defined as the environmental problems? In my opinion, whatever we human being does can be considered environmental problems because we can do nothing without affecting our living condition. They rank from ordinary activities like throwing out the garbage without separation to extra-ordinary activities like leaving unused astronomy parts in the space….We may create environmental problems even with the actions that we thought of as environment conservation. For example, to avoid global warming, people try to avoid green house fuel. In order to do that, they may think of some replacement:Thorium[1], for instance (but there are many other proposals, you can name them…). Although it is a very promise nuclear fuel [2], although it has just been researched and there are still many difficulties that scientists have to overcome, some precautions have been raised:“ Exposure to aerosolized thorium can lead to increased risk of cancer of the lung, pancreas, and blood. Exposure to thorium internally leads to increased risk of liver diseases. This element has no known biological role”[2].Can I call those precautions as environmental problems? We cannot solve known problems by creating unknown ones, can we?
Obviously, we can control the environmental problems by controlling our activities. Imagine that we human being just do nothing, take it easy and relax, so I don’t see any reasons for the environment to cry. But it is just an illusion because people have to use the surrounding environment to feed themselves (so everywhere existing the human, there must have been environmental problems existed too).
Of course there is a time that the environment cannot suffer us anymore. Naturally, the human being is noticed by storm, flood, desert and green house effect...People soon realized that message and agreed that we should do some things to prevent ourselves from distinction. We create dramatic films to warn other people about environmental problems (“The Ice Age”, “Armageddon”, to name just a few…), and to make money. But who is responsible for such those huge problems salvation? Of course, every single human being is. But what a pity, “everyone” means “no one”.
Why? We can see that nowadays, almost every human’s activities are controlled by money, businessmen usually do not want to pay their money in the green technologies unless they are forced to do so by their investors, their consumers or by their governments. The investors cannot wait for their capital to rebreed. All they want is how to make their capital grow as fast as possible, if the speed of one business growth is so slow in comparation with others (what would easily happen to green business in the short run), the money for that business should be taken out for a faster one. Do the consumers want to avoid the environmental problems? Yes and No. Yes because they have already heard about the environment danger and as their roles of human, they want to stop it. No because if preventing the environment means increasing their total cost and decreasing convenience so not many people are still willing to follow it. Even if they want to do that, they are so environmental under-educated to do. Do the governments want to stop those problems? I think it should be more than that, the governments must invest their money in the green technology and create green policy to protect the environment more, cause this seem to be their most certain mission, after all, they are formed to take care about the public services. To analyze the governments’ situations, let divide the world into developing and developed countries. The developing governments are so busy using each and every borrowing penny to raise and keep their economical growth rate, they afraid of losing the foreign investors' interest so much that they cannot take care of the environment conservation. The presidents of the developed governments have their hands tied by election donators. Those presidents often prefer not to change the law in a harmful manner to the development of big daddies’ business. We now have been agreed to each other that human’s activities are destroying the environment. We cannot solve those known problems by creating unknown ones, but we cannot stop our actions either, because, we have to live for ourselves and for our investors.
So, are we finished soon? No, it’s not the human’s characteristic.
Actually, a single solution would be never enough for such complicated problems. A compound should be more feasible. In this paper, I would dare to propose agreen compound. The green compound comprises of a better controversy of human’s activities and another direction for science and technology.
A green education is very necessary because just by education that we can optimize the human’s activities. Everybody should have the right to obtain a high level of education background in environment. The education must facilitate the people with the urgent of the environment conservation. For example, they might live without cars if it’s not necessary even if they can afford buying those [7]
A more acceptable global green protocol keeps the international governments run into the right track. The environment is truly a global resource that countries must have to be responsibility for using it. The responsibility can be paid by money as usual. And again, money can drive human’s activities more easily than anything else. If a nation wants to increase its economical growth which pollutes the environment, they have to buy that right. This money will be invested back to the global environment conservation projects. Of course we cannot have a flat responsibility in which developed countries want to pay the same as developing countries. The reason is because developed countries have already contributed a lot to the current situation of environmental problems, that’s why they should fore-step and help developing countries. Kyoto protocol [3] is one kind of this green protocol but there are still too many arguments around the protocol that should be solved before it can makes a real movement. This is the place where developed countries should play their roles rather than leading some wars (which are believed to be driven by conventional fuel resources).
The science and the technology should not try to find some new fuel resources. As we know, we should never end this chain if we don’t break them. Instead, science and technology should focus on how to decrease the human’s activities. For example, they should try to figure out a way to use less energy, decrease the time for the earth to recycle, find more feasible environment protocols
At the end, we are not divided by countries, we are standing together, to face these global environmental problems. Let me introduce the ideal of a Germany prominent anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor, I think it is as warm as the globe:
In Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me -
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
Martin Niemöller(1892—1984)
I think it is the same problem for our environment. The world is globalizing so you have no choice other than treat them globally. Make your move or there is no one else beside you and you don’t even have a chance to do it alone.
REFERENCE
[1] Robert J. Samuelson – Global Warming’s real inconvenient truth – Washington Post – Wednesday, July, 2006.
[2] Wikipedia – Thorium - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium.
[3] Wikipedia – Kyoto protocol - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_protocol.
[4] Wikiquote - Martin Niemöller - http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Niemöller.
[5] Kendra Okonski – Fear of flying: why green alarmist are wrong – The Spectator – 4 /11/2006.
[6] Allister Health – It is a wonderful world: richer, healthier, and cleaner than ever – The Spectator – 2/12/2006.
[7] Isabelle de Pommereau – New German community models car-free living-The Christian Science Monitor – 21/12/2006.
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- Quote paper
- Master of Science in Engineering Le Tien Anh (Author), 2006, Economic growth and environment conservation, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/120774
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