May 02, 2002
What's Your Ecological Footprint? I'm
What's Your Ecological Footprint? I'm not an environmental scientist, but something tells me that the science, math, and the economics behind the Ecological Footprint Calculator are a little specious. Basically, the calculator takes some of your daily habits as inputs, and tells you how many planet earths we would need to support the planet's population if everyone lived the way you did. I played with all the variables and the highest figure I could gin out of the calculator was 19.3 hectares per person and 9.3 planet earths.
In particular, I point to the section of the calculator that takes into account the amount of waste one generates, and whether that waste can be recycled. As Bjorn Lomborg tells us in The Skeptical Environmentalist:
"[T]he entire waste generated in the U.S. throughout the rest of the 21st century will fit within a square landfill less than 18 miles on the side."
Lomborg deals with this issue in further detail, backing things up with the latest data available in Chapter 20, "Waste: Running Out of Space?"
"Moreover, the scenario with ever increasing amounts of waste is probably rather exaggerated, especially considering that most economic growth will be in the service industries and information technology as we noted in the chapter on raw materials. . ."
"Even so, the main point here is that we will not be inundated with garbage. Garbage in something we can deal with. It is a management problem."
"This does not however, imply that landfills will be easy to site. Nobody wants to be neighbor to a landfill -- a phenomenon so familiar that it has even been given a name: NIMBY, or Not In My Backyard. Thus, garbage may be a political problem, but it is not a problem of lack of physical space."
Lomborg's book has been getting plenty of attention lately, and while it can be understood by laymen, the book can be rough sledding at times. Despite this, it's an important book, and one that has raised more than a few hackles in the environmental community, a clash most notably played out in the pages of Scientific American.
Lomborg's thesis is a simple one, and was culled from the predictions put forward by late University of Maryland economist Julian Simon: over the long term, our environment is gradually getting better, a thesis greatly at odds with the vast majority of ecological doomsayers that predict that the earth is travelling on greased rails to hell.
But Lomborg is no patsy of the right, as many of his detractors have tried to claim. Despite sticking to his thesis, he does also say that the current conditions we are living under, while gradually improving, may not be ideal. What he does support is using vigorous research to determine a cost/benefit analysis for the remedies that are proposed.
Doesn't sound too crazy to me. Makes you wonder why his book has kicked up such a fuss. Perhaps somebody has something to hide?
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03:39 PM