re: stifling of scieneGregg Easterbrook talks about the Third World vs. First World in his essay "Environmental Doomsday - Bad News Good, Good News Bad": Gross air pollution from unregulated industry, from cars and trucks without Western tailpipe controls, from dirty gasoline and diesel fuels, and worst of all from indoor smoke—more than a billion people worldwide heat and cook with indoor fires—make air pollution in Lagos, Delhi, and many other developing-world cities worse than anything in the West since London in the 1950s. For a third of the world's population, safe drinking water is a rarity—or an expensive luxury. In Indonesia, for example, the poor spend a significant fraction of their income to buy a few liters of safe water from vendors; here, we pay pennies per thousand gallons. Wastewater treatment is often unknown: I've seen boys in Pakistan swimming in open sewage canals that run down city boulevards. All told, the number of children under the age of five who die each year in the developing world from gross air pollution and unsafe drinking water—two causes of death essentially eliminated in the West—is larger than the number of deaths at all ages from all causes each year in the United States and the European Union combined.Read the whole thing here. |
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