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ENVIRONMENTAL TRENDS--PART 2
Here we continue summarizing the main points from the 327-page report titled OECD ENVIRONMENTAL OUTLOOK[1] from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which describes current environmental trends in the OECD's 30 member nations.
The OECD report forecasts environmental trends to the year 2020, using a traffic signal to highlight major conclusions: green lights where it's OK to "proceed with caution," yellow lights for important issues that are still shrouded in uncertainty and red lights for problems that require "urgent action" because they are likely to "significantly worsen" by 2020. Notice that even the "green light" issues warrant only a "proceed with caution" advisory from the OECD.
Here we continue listing the most important "red light" problems that the OECD has identified:
** Energy: Total energy use will increase 35% in OECD regions by 2020, and 51% elsewhere in the world. Oil will remain the OECD's energy mainstay, and the share of oil supplied by OPEC countries[3] will increase from 54% today to 74% by 2020. Only 6% of energy will come from renewable sources (such as solar power) by 2020, says the OECD, and even this "will depend upon financial incentives from government."
The OECD report does not say so, but any such financial incentives would be subject to challenge under World Trade Organization rules as illegal restraints of free trade. The WTO does not allow governments to subsidize particular industries, such as solar energy, though of course military subsidies to keep the oil flowing from the Middle East are allowed. By 2020, the share of OECD energy supplied by nuclear power may decline slightly from its current 11%, the OECD says, because the technology lacks popular support everywhere.
** Global warming: "Global warming is a reality," says the OECD report. (pg. 157) As the Earth warms, we should expect more extreme weather in some regions (floods, droughts, and perhaps more "catastrophic" events such as large hurricanes and typhoons). We should also expect the sea level to rise somewhere between 6 inches and 37 inches by the year 2100, inundating valuable and densely-populated coastal lands. Serious human diseases carried by mosquitoes, such as dengue fever (also called "breakbone fever" because it is so painful) and malaria, are likely to increase in both the northern and southern hemispheres, says the OECD. "The possible effects of climate change are a widely recognised future threat to human health," says the OECD. "Climate change might result in new infectious diseases, as well as changing patterns of known diseases, and loss of life due to extreme weather conditions."
"Overall studies show that some of the most adverse impacts [of global warming] are bound to occur in the Southern Hemisphere where countries are most vulnerable and least likely to easily adapt to climate change," says the OECD.
Humans are contributing to global warming by releasing "greenhouse gases" -- mainly carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Of these, CO2 is the largest. The OECD forecasts CO2 emissions rising 33% in OECD countries and 100% in the rest of the world by 2020. To meet the goals of the Kyoto agreement, intended to curb the damage from global warming, OECD countries will need to reduce their CO2 emissions by anywhere from 18% to 40% depending on what non-OECD countries do. (pg. 160) Given that the U.S. increased its CO2 emissions 11% between 1990 and 1998, even an 18% reduction by 2020 would require a Herculean political commitment to reverse "business as usual."
** Chemicals: Although the chemical industry creates large quantities of hazardous waste, an even bigger problem is its products. The OECD says there are somewhere between one and two million chemical preparations on the market today, each a mixture of two or more individual chemicals that do not react with each other. Each of these preparations must be considered in light of workplace hazards, accidents involving hazardous materials, and harmful exposures of workers in other industries, consumers, the general public, and the natural environment, says the OECD. Unfortunately, there is "an immense knowledge gap about chemicals on the market," says the OECD: governments "lack adequate safety information about the great majority of chemicals." (pg. 223) The "unknown hazard" from chemicals is a "major concern," says the OECD.
"Major concerns exist about the possible impact on the environment and human health of substances produced by the chemicals industry, which are found in virtually every man-made product," says the OECD. "Many are being detected in the environment, where particular problems can be caused by persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic chemicals. Concern is growing, for example, about chemicals which cause endocrine disruption and which persist in the environment," OECD says. (pg. 223) Endocrine disruption refers to industrial chemicals, released into the environment, that interfere with the hormones that control growth, development, and behavior in all birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, snails, lobsters, insects, and mammals, including humans.
Evidently the OECD does not have confidence that governments -- or the chemical industry itself -- can control the chemical problem because the report explicitly says that vigilance by non-governmental organizations -- the environmental movement -- will be "critical" to the success of efforts to assess the hazards of chemicals that are already on the market. And of course assessing the hazards is only a first step -- prelude to the much more contentious question of curbs, phase-outs, forced substitutions, or bans.
In sum, persistent toxic chemicals "are expected to continue being widespread in the environment over the next 20 years, causing serious effects on human health," the OECD says.
** Human Health: "The loss of health due to environmental degradation is substantial" in OECD countries. (pg. 253) The "most urgent issues" are "air pollution and exposure to chemicals," the OECD says. The "greatest cause for concern" is the "threat of continuing widespread release of chemicals to the environment." (pg. 252) "This is not only a question of the amount of chemicals that end up in the environment, but more a question of their characteristics and effects. Unfortunately, the latter are often unknown, as the recent discovery of the endocrine disrupting effects of certain pesticide ingredients has shown," the OECD says.
The OECD estimates that environmental degradation causes somewhere between 2% and 6% of all human disease in OECD countries and 8% to 13% in non-OECD countries. In OECD countries this presently translates into health-care costs between $50 billion and $130 billion per year, the OECD says.
The OECD report highlights two kinds of air pollution that can harm humans: ground-level ozone, and fine particles, both created by cars and trucks. Ground-level ozone -- a component of smog -- exacerbates asthma, bronchitis, emphysema and other chest ailments, and diminishes lung capacity even in healthy children. Health standards for ozone are exceeded at 95% of monitoring sites in the U.S. and Japan and at 90% of sites in Europe, the OECD reports.
Fine particles -- soot so small that you can't see it, except as a haze -- presently kill twice as many people as automobile accidents each year, the OECD says. (pg. 176) And particles produced by diesel engines cause lung cancer -- in the U.S. alone, an estimated 125,000 new cases each year, the OECD says.
Environment and health costs from transportation presently amount to 8% of GDP (gross domestic product) in Europe, not counting the costs of traffic congestion, the OECD says. (pg. 176) And motor vehicles will increase 32% in OECD countries by 2020, and 74% worldwide. (pg. 170) As we approach 2020, stricter emission controls will reduce urban air contaminants in many OECD countries, but much of the rest of the world will be driving older cars and trucks without benefit of modern controls.
Environmentalists, of course, would like to add many details to the OECD's sobering report. The most blatant omission is the biggest killer of all -- the workplace environment. As we have reported previously, work-related injuries and disease kill about 165 workers EACH DAY in the U.S. alone -- a mammoth, ongoing human rights violation that the OECD report has managed to ignore.
By cherry-picking data and sometimes fudging the details, writers like Bjorn Lomborg manage to confuse the public by claiming that environmental problems have been exaggerated or don't really exist.[4] But this is the wrong time to be pretending that all is well because the trends are otherwise. The world's oceans, forests and biodiversity are clearly in trouble. Global warming is real and, given the political power of oil and coal companies, intractable. Waste is immense and growing, but toxic PRODUCTS are an even bigger problem. Toxic chemicals can now be measured at low levels in the bodies of living things everywhere on Earth, from the bottoms of the deepest oceans to the most remote mountain tops. Exotic industrial poisons have been introduced into all of us without our informed consent -- invading our bodies even before we are born -- and new harms from these toxic trespassers are discovered almost daily as ignorance and cover-up give way to openness and knowledge. But we needn't wait for yet another scientific study. We already know enough to act and act decisively.
The basic problem is that "free market" ideology regards the natural environment as an inexhaustible supermarket for raw materials and a bottomless free toilet for wastes. Both of these conceptions are dead wrong, and therefore "markets" must not be free -- they must be moderated by social covenants and government policies -- ranging from simple generosity and sharing on an international scale, to fessing up and taking responsibility for the consequences of our actions on a corporate scale, plus a range of government sanctions and strictures, including purchasing preferences, subsidies for clean technologies, green taxes and fees, precautionary regulations and actions, guarantees of workplace safety and health (with real teeth), stiff fines, and even prison for repeat polluters. The key reforms must aim to create a vastly more responsive democracy, allowing people to make decisions by talking together about those things that affect their lives, displacing the elitist corporate rule that both Democrats and Republicans today call government.
Reversing environmental decline will require above all the commodity in shortest supply: courageous political commitment and democratic policy innovations based firmly and explicitly on the principle of forecaring or precaution, to counteract decades of "free market" theology that have left governments weakened, democracy vitiated, and the environment inadequately protected. If we and our unelected "leaders" can't -- or won't -- face up to the necessary changes, the environmental outlook for our children and grandchildren will be grim indeed.
ENVIRONMENTAL TRENDS -- PART 1
Every couple of years someone writes a new report claiming that most environmental problems have been greatly exaggerated or don't even exist. There are now at least a dozen writers and publicists who spend their days putting a smiley face on environmental trends including Gregg Easterbrook (NEW REPUBLIC, and author, A MOMENT ON THE EARTH, 1995), Michael Fumento (author, SCIENCE UNDER SIEGE, 1993), Rush Limbaugh (syndicated radio talker), John Stossel (ABC TV), and John Tierney (NEW YORK TIMES), among others. Now a Danish mathematician, Bjorn Lomborg, has joined the ranks of these illuminati with a new book called THE OPTIMISTIC ENVIRONMENTALIST (2001), which we will review in the future.
The details vary, but the basic message from all these savants is similar: the environment is not seriously deteriorating; indeed, it is improving in almost every way. Human population? Growth has slowed. Forest loss? In many countries, tree cover is expanding. Global warming? It may not be so bad -- northern winters will be more pleasant. Toxic chemicals? The worst is past. The real problem, they say, is all those gloomy environmentalists scaring us to death simply to raise money.
When these contrarian reports grab headlines, the public -- understandably -- doesn't know what to believe. Do environmental problems really exist or do they exist only in the minds of environmental wackos and professional doomsayers?
To get our bearings in this debate, we can turn to the mainstream of the mainstream: a new 327-page report titled OECD ENVIRONMENTAL OUTLOOK from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which describes environmental trends in the OECD's 29 member nations (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the U.K. and the U.S.).
This is no Chicken Little manifesto from the fringe.
The OECD report forecasts environmental trends to the year 2020, using a traffic signal to highlight major conclusions: green lights where things are improving and it's OK to "proceed with caution" (for example, organic agriculture, which is growing at 20% per year); yellow lights for big, important issues that are still shrouded in uncertainty (such as genetic engineering of food crops); and red lights for problems that require "urgent action" because they are likely to "significantly worsen" by 2020. [Throughout this issue of RACHEL'S, page numbers refer to the OECD's ENVIRONMENTAL OUTLOOK report.]
Here is a bare-bones sketch of the most important "red light" problems that the OECD has identified:
** Human population, worldwide, will grow 1.1% per year between now and 2020, increasing from 6.1 billion people to 7.5 billion, or 23%. This basic trend will impose a 23% greater burden on the natural environment in the next 20 years. Furthermore, as household size diminishes (requiring more individual homes) and urban sprawl increases, the burden imposed on the environment by each individual is steadily rising, the OECD says.
** Ocean fish provide 20% of all the protein in the human diet today but 50% of the world's marine fisheries are already producing as much as they possibly can, 15% are being over-fished (an obviously unsustainable practice) and another 7% are fully depleted. Pressure on the oceans' fisheries will not decline any time soon because the global fishing fleet now has at least 30% more capacity than the oceans can supply on a sustained basis : more and more ships are chasing fewer and fewer fish. We should not expect increased fish yields from the oceans between now and 2020, the OECD says, so any increase must come from fish farming. But fish farms have serious problems of their own -- large concentrations of fish-waste nutrients, which can deplete species diversity; large-scale feeding of antibiotics, which can harm other species and disturb whole ecosystems; and escaping fish that can drive out native species and spread disease. As a consequence of these trends, the OECD forecasts a 10% decline in marine fish harvest by OECD countries by 2020.
** Fresh water: The demand for fresh water must rise to keep pace with population growth, but water pollution is reducing the useable supply in most countries. As surface waters become exhausted or polluted, many countries begin pumping their underground aquifers, but nature replenishes such underground supplies only slowly. Seventeen countries are already pumping more water from underground than nature replaces each year.
Furthermore, underground water supplies are being polluted: "Available evidence suggests that there is a trend towards a worsening of aquifer water quality in OECD regions. Once groundwater sources are contaminated, they can be very difficult to clean up because the rate of flow is usually very slow and purification measures are often costly," the OECD says. (pg. 103) Worse, growing water scarcity is already giving rise to conflicts within and between countries, the OECD says, a trend likely to accelerate.
** Forests: Within OECD countries, original "old growth" forests are being cut and replaced by secondary growth and by simple tree farms, which require artificial fertilizers and pesticides to survive. Thus, although the total area of forests is holding steady in OECD regions, the QUALITY of forested lands, in terms of natural habitat and biodiversity, is steadily declining. Some trees may grow quickly but forests take centuries to mature. The prospect for tropical forests is worse. With 37 million acres being cut down each year, "Tropical deforestation is expected to continue at alarming rates over the next few decades," says the OECD. (pg. 125) Between now and 2020, the world will lose almost 6% of its total forested land.
** Acid Rain: Acid rain, snow and fog, caused by emissions of sulphur and nitrogen oxides, damage forests, soils and fresh water ecosystems. Acid rain "has been identified as an important factor in forest demise," says the OECD, and "Current acid deposition levels in Northern Europe and parts of North America are at least twice as high as critical levels." In Europe the situation is expected to improve in the next 10 years but elsewhere in the world, it is expected to worsen. Outside OECD countries, both sulphur and nitrogen oxide emissions are expected to increase substantially in the next two decades: "Thus, acid depositions are likely to continue to contribute to acidification of surface waters and soils in these areas and reduce the quality of the most sensitive ecosystems."
** Biodiversity: Humans are relentlessly clearing and plowing up the habitat needed by other creatures, mostly converting it to farmland. Then many of the farmlands themselves are being despoiled by irrigation (which brings salts up from deep soils and deposits them in the top layers) and by soil erosion. According to the OECD, two-thirds of the world's farmlands have already been degraded to some degree and one-third have been "strongly or very strongly degraded." (pg. 138) Furthermore, half the world's wetlands have already been destroyed. (pg. 136) And the biodiversity of freshwater ecosystems is "under serious threat" with 20% of the world's fresh water fish extinct, threatened or endangered. Half of all primates, and 9% of all known species of trees are at some risk of extinction, the OECD says. Between now and 2020, biodiversity in OECD countries is likely to degrade further. It is hard to put a smiley face on the prognosis for biodiversity, the biological platform upon which all humans depend.
** Municipal solid waste, or garbage: In 1995, the average person in OECD countries created 1100 pounds of garbage each year. By 2020 this is expected to increase 28% to 1400 pounds per person per year. Because of growing population, total OECD garbage will increase 43% by 2020, reaching 847 million tons each year. (pgs. 203, 236) Outside the OECD regions, annual garbage production is expected to more than double by 2020, reaching 1450 million tons per year.
In 1997, 64% of OECD garbage went to landfills (where it can contaminate underground water supplies [pg. 242]), 18% was incinerated (producing a range of noxious air pollutants, including the notoriously toxic, mobile and long-lived dioxins and furans, and 18% was recycled. By 2020, the OECD says, only 50% of OECD garbage will be landfilled, 17% will be incinerated, and 33% will be recycled. Most waste ultimately escapes into the general environment in one form or another.
** Hazardous waste: OECD countries presently create 220 pounds of legally-hazardous waste per person per year. By 2020, per-capita production will rise 47% to 320 pounds per person per year and, because of growing population, total OECD hazardous waste will increase 60% to 194 million tons each year.
Significant portions of this will enter the general environment and eventually begin moving through food chains.
A partial survey of 13 out of 29 OECD countries has identified 475,000 sites that may be contaminated by hazardous industrial chemicals. The OECD estimates the cost of cleaning up these sites at $330 billion, a large number indeed.
--Peter Montague
CORRECTIONv We inadvertently exaggerated the poor quality of the air in lower Manhattan last week. Our paragraph read, "Notably, in spite of EPA's assurances of safety, more than 4000 people have developed chronic chest pain, a persistent cough now known as "world trade center cough" and asthma-like (or emphysema-like) breathing problems from exposure to the air in lower Manhattan."
The paragraph should have read:
"Notably, in spite of EPA's assurances of safety, more than 4000 workers at ground zero have developed chronic chest pain, a persistent cough now known as "world trade center cough" and asthma-like (or emphysema-like) breathing problems from exposure to the air at the disaster site."
We apologize for the error. The point we were making remains unchanged: EPA's conclusion that the air near ground zero is "safe for workers and residents" rests on incomplete data and false assumptions.
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