Hi all!
I wanted to start this thread to have a discussion of the pollution and state of Earth. What is the worst way your part of world gets polluted?
What could we do to "save the world" ? !!
Haidi
It's mostly "third world" countries that are affected. Here's some alarming statistics:
Over 1 billion people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water. 5,000 people die each day due to dirty drinking water.
Americans make up an estimated 5% of the world’s population. However, the U.S. produces an estimated 30% of the world’s waste and uses 25% of the world’s resources.
While children only make up 10% of the world’s population, over 40% of the global burden of disease falls on them. More than 3 million children under age five die annually from environmental factors.
from:
http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/11-facts-about-pollution
I put quotes around the phrase "third world" because it was coined by a French demographer, anthropologist and historian named Alfred Sauvy August 14, 1952. You never hear the term "second world" although it was inferred by the phrase that the communist blocs like Russia, China, and North Korea were the second world countries.
It should be noted that it isn't the populations who live in the third world who do most of the polluting - it is corporate interest (or greed if you like) that lies at the root of the cause. It is the promise of money coming into a third world country and thereby increasing the chances of them climbing toward the "first world" that entices less powerful nations into becoming complicit in the pollution.
According to this site:
http://www.statisticbrain.com/countries-ranked-by-air-pollution/
Mongolia is the worst, and Botswana is second, etc.
Mongolia is part of China, but China is very big and there are large regions there that are not polluted, hence the lower overall rating. But make no mistake, China has far fewer regulations than most of the "first world" (Europe and America mostly), and therefore they get away with it. They are very "ambitious", and expend all their resources trying to catch up with Europe and America. There are some who say that all poorer nations are "emerging". If that means they are growing in the ability to pollute then that term would be just about right. They want what we all have - cars, modern conveniences, planes, trains and so on.
So far I've been talking about toxic pollution. CO2 is a whole other ball game. CO2 isn't harmful to humans - we exhale CO2 from our lungs. The excess of it will melt ice, and cause climate variations like droughts and hurricanes. The fact that most of the world's population lives on the coastlines means that if we keep this up, we will begin to have to construct barriers, or move the people.
http://co2now.org is a good site for monitoring, but here
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/env_co2_emi-environment-co2-emissions is the ranking of contributors.
This is all of course good fodder for Science Fiction writers. If you really want to change the world, change your little part of it and set a good example, or become king of the world so you can lord it over the corporations. I'm doing my part. I work at wind farms.
