Dunno how much i agree with the idea of helping to improve their living conditions.. Maybe we're helping the Party rulers buy their next maserati
My friend who has an economics degree says this is the way it has to be for china to modernise, but jesus the environment and animal population over there is taking a hell of a whack from it
He also mentioned during study they discussed that polluting of the oceans and destruction of forests won't stop until theres a dollar value put on every tree and every ocean
Scary stuff
Yeah a bit scary Czechmate, but fascinating.
There is already a huge boom in the "middle classes" in China. Things are improving rapidly. What do you think the top politicians and execs drive around in, in democracies? Have you not noticed the 15 mil payouts for being utter failures in their positions for a few yrs, while ordinary people are being cleaned out when the "global economy" hits a snag?
Political systems seem largely irrelevant. The global economy doesn't care. Whether we vote for them or otherwise, we don't elect people to represent our interests and likely never have. We elect who is going to have authority over us. We are then treated more like cattle.
As to conditions in developing nations. There are a few good peer reviewed sociology papers around that (indirectly) deal with this. The economic, capitalist, democratic and military marvel that is the US, the wealthiest nation on earth, is quite a failure socio-economically. To look at the stats re what makes a functioning healthy society, without looking at who they belong to, you could be forgiven for thinking they were from some 3rd world backwater dictatorship somewhere. Sadly our leaders seem set on emulating this.
Something that has never seemed right regarding our economic system is that half of our planet lives in poverty. Yet it's considered a great success?
Your friend is right, there seems no way to slow or stop capitalism without civilisation as we now know it, also stopping. It isn't only China's critters taking a beating. It is happening right here in Aus. Have you noticed our elapids less frequently in urban areas? If you look for them in remote regions where they used to proliferate, it's similar. As difficult to find as the frogs they prey on. Our marsupial carnivores are even harder to find and are likely all heading to extinction very soon. We have an atrocious history regarding species extinctions.
The oceans are likely to be depleted of fish stocks from overfishing, acidification and warming by mid century. There simply will be no commercial fishing anymore. Our reefs and phytoplankton are slowly disappearing.
This all sounds chicken little/fringe doom and gloom, but it is mainstream science. Unfortunately science is ultra conservative and isn't giving the full picture, rather the best possible scenario and assumes we can reduce what we are doing. Not likely, our economic systems require constant growth, or they collapse. More people, industry, farms and so on.
There is no feasible technology we could implement to reverse this either. If our planet already ran on green energy it would be a struggle simply to keep up with growth itself.
The great permian extinction was thought by many scientists to have been preceded by large scale volcanic activity affecting our atmosphere (global warming) and release of the oceans methane, acid rain etc. It took 40-80 thousand years for around 96 % of species vanish and be left very little apart from microbes. We have the potential to achieve this in a few centuries. A rise of anything above 6 deg could potentially result such a runaway effect apparently. 4 deg itself is unlikely to cause such a thing, but would be catastrophic and is not an unrealistic figure. The IPCC idea of no more that 2 deg by the end of the century seems pie in the sky.
Some very respectable and quite conservative scientists are beginning to wonder if humans will exist beyond this century. Many of them at least agree that civilisation as we know it probably won't. We simply have no will or way to turn things around.
Sorry for the length and bit of a rant. Like Hamlet, humanity is looking at "to be, or not to be". It's a fascinating subject.
($160 each, fitted)
