Psamathe wrote:meic wrote:.....
China has had unjustified bad press on environmental issues.
Firstly their possibly "barbaric" one child policy was probably the single most beneficial policy decision for the world's environment.
Secondly they are making the greater efforts and changes towards improvement than many of the other industrial nations.
I have no kids so find it difficult to appreciate the family impact of a one child policy. However, for years I have felt that China recognised they had a major issue and took action to address that issue. We may disagree with what they did but they certainly deserve credit for having done something. So often we (humanity) recognises a major issue and we prevaricate, hold meetings, conferences, deny there is an issue or proclaim that addressing the issue will impact the profits streaming to the wealthy elite. We might debate the action China took but at least they did something to (try to) address the problem they faced - which is more than we tend to do.
I also feel that so often people use daft statistics to assess contributors to problems. Climate change where people talk about how little CO2 the UK emits. To me what is relevant is the emissions per head of population. Of course a bigger population will emit more CO2 to measuring emissions based on some historic line on a map is beyond daft.
Ian
+1
I believe China is taking huge steps to reduce it's Co2 output by renewables and nuclear.
With regard to the Gaia theory,IMHO we're a very successful species with unknown technical ability and yet we really don't know what's good for us in the sense that we know where we're going wrong yet refuse to do anything radical about it,perhaps the planet has other ideas.....