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Opinions: The cost of a country's development: the environment


Last week, The Economist reported that China is unveiling new measures in an attempt to curb their carbon emissions.

China has notoriously been known to be lax on its environmental policies, especially as it continues to develop its large cities at a feverish pace. The problem is painstakingly obvious to anybody who has visited a Chinese city.

A couple months ago a professor who had visited Beijing told me out of the two weeks he was in the city, there was only one day of sunshine.

This, by the way, was not due to rainy weather, but from anthropogenic pollution.

Clearly, China is becoming a leading contributor to global carbon pollution. China's situation, however, brings up an important debate: should a developing country be allowed to develop at the expense of its environment and natural resources?

At the heart of the conflict is a theory published by Simon Kuznets.

Kuznets shows that developing countries will harm their environment, but as their economy and standard of living increases, they will soon allocate more resources to protect their environment. This is what most of the developing world argues when international environmental restrictions are imposed upon them.

Moreover, many developing nations claim that by restricting their development, developed countries are unfairly depriving them from the ability to achieve a higher standard of living.

These arguments carry several fallacies. First, degradation of the environment cannot easily be reversed, even after a nation becomes developed and no matter how rich that nation is.

Developing an effective replacement to coal or gasoline, for example, takes a long process that involves efficiency of not only the technology itself, but also its price tag. Additionally, other non-technological factors go into whether the technology or solution will even be accepted.

Even today, much of the developed world cannot even agree on how to cap carbon emissions, as evidenced by the rifts caused by the Kyoto Protocol. This is in spite of the fact that most countries have accepted carbon emissions as a major global problem.

The key assumption in the "destroy now, protect later" method is that earth can withstand the strain for a period of development. This may have been true in the early 20th century when far fewer countries were developing.

In today's world, much more of the world is urbanizing. While it is unclear whether the earth can withstand this level of strain, this uncertainty is cause enough for concern.

The good news is that developing nations do not have to pick one side over the other. Because today's world is so interconnected and interdependent, developing countries can afford to develop at a sustainable rate through fostering international partnerships.

Developing countries can encourage investment into their country, thus modernizing and urbanizing their infrastructure.

Corporations, on the other hand, would be encouraged by the prospect of a new and untapped market. Moreover, developing nations don't have to carry all the burden of developing renewable technologies.

As cleaner technologies are made efficient in developed nations, it is becoming easier and relatively more inexpensive for developing nations to adopt such technologies.

Developing countries face an unenviable position. They face pressures from their people to increase standards of living and they also field pressures from the global community to protect their environment. But because international partnerships are thriving more than ever, it is becoming more and more pragmatic for a developing nation to develop and protect their environments.

Reach the columnist at: uven.chong@asu.edu.


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