Keio University Falculty of Science and Technology
Culture Science Technology - Term end report
"Economic growth and environment conservation"
Le Tien Anh
"Do economic growth and environment conservation go together?" That was the
old question asked by many generations. Logically, the answer tents to be "NO", both
from the personal business to the government policy maker point of view. In this small
report, I will try to recognize, analyze environment problems and summarize some of
the solutions for them.
What can be defined as the environmental problems? In my opinion, whatever we
human being does can be considered environmental problems because we can do
nothing without affecting our living condition. They rank from ordinary activities like
throwing out the garbage without separation to extra-ordinary activities like leaving
unused astronomy parts in the space...We may create environmental problems even
with the actions that we thought of as environment conservation. For example, to avoid
global warming, people try to avoid green house fuel. In order to do that, they may think
of some replacement: Thorium [1], for instance (but there are many other proposals,
you can name them...). Although it is a very promise nuclear fuel [2], although it has
just been researched and there are still many difficulties that scientists have to overcome,
some precautions have been raised: "
Exposure to aerosolized thorium can lead to
increased risk of cancer of the lung, pancreas, and blood. Exposure to thorium
internally leads to increased risk of liver diseases. This element has no known biological
role" [2]. Can I call those precautions as environmental problems? We cannot solve
known problems by creating unknown ones, can we?
Obviously, we can control the environmental problems by controlling our
activities. Imagine that we human being just do nothing, take it easy and relax, so I don't
see any reasons for the environment to cry. But it is just an illusion because people have
to use the surrounding environment to feed themselves (so everywhere existing the
human, there must have been environmental problems existed too).
Of course there is a time that the environment cannot suffer us anymore. Naturally,
the human being is noticed by storm, flood, desert and green house effect...People soon
realized that message and agreed that we should do some things to prevent ourselves
from distinction. We create dramatic films to warn other people about environmental
problems ("The Ice Age", "Armageddon", to name just a few...), and to make money.
But who is responsible for such those huge problems salvation? Of course, every single
human being is. But what a pity, "everyone" means "no one".
Why? We can see that nowadays, almost every human's activities are controlled
by money, businessmen usually do not want to pay their money in the green
technologies unless they are forced to do so by their investors, their consumers or by
their governments. The investors cannot wait for their capital to rebreed. All they want is
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Keio University Falculty of Science and Technology
how to make their capital grow as fast as possible, if the speed of one business growth is
so slow in comparation with others (what would easily happen to green business in the
short run), the money for that business should be taken out for a faster one. Do the
consumers want to avoid the environmental problems? Yes and No. Yes because they
have already heard about the environment danger and as their roles of human, they want
to stop it. No because if preventing the environment means increasing their total cost
and decreasing convenience so not many people are still willing to follow it. Even if
they want to do that, they are so environmental under-educated to do. Do the
governments want to stop those problems? I think it should be more than that, the
governments must invest their money in the green technology and create green policy to
protect the environment more, cause this seem to be their most certain mission, after all,
they are formed to take care about the public services. To analyze the governments'
situations, let divide the world into developing and developed countries. The developing
governments are so busy using each and every borrowing penny to raise and keep their
economical growth rate, they afraid of losing the foreign investors' interest so much that
they cannot take care of the environment conservation. The presidents of the developed
governments have their hands tied by election donators. Those presidents often prefer
not to change the law in a harmful manner to the development of big daddies' business.
We now have been agreed to each other that human's activities are destroying the
environment. We cannot solve those known problems by creating unknown ones, but we
cannot stop our actions either, because, we have to live for ourselves and for our
investors.
So, are we finished soon? No, it's not the human's characteristic.
Actually, a single solution would be never enough for such complicated problems.
A compound should be more feasible. In this paper, I would dare to propose a green
compound. The green compound comprises of a better controversy of human's
activities and another direction for science and technology.
A green education is very necessary because just by education that we can
optimize the human's activities. Everybody should have the right to obtain a high level
of education background in environment. The education must facilitate the people with
the urgent of the environment conservation. For example, they might live without cars if
it's not necessary even if they can afford buying those [7]...
A more acceptable global green protocol keeps the international governments run
into the right track. The environment is truly a global resource that countries must have
to be responsibility for using it. The responsibility can be paid by money as usual. And
again, money can drive human's activities more easily than anything else. If a nation
wants to increase its economical growth which pollutes the environment, they have to
buy that right. This money will be invested back to the global environment conservation
projects. Of course we cannot have a flat responsibility in which developed countries
want to pay the same as developing countries. The reason is because developed
countries have already contributed a lot to the current situation of environmental
problems, that's why they should fore-step and help developing countries. Kyoto
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