Envi

EFFECT OF STANDARD OF LIVING Standard of living is generally measured by standards such as real (i.e. inflation adjusted) income per person and poverty rate. Other measures such as access and quality of health care, income growth inequality and educational standards are also used. Examples are access to certain goods (such as number of refrigerators per 1000 people), or measures of health such as life expectancy. It is the ease by which people living in a time or place are able to satisfy their wants. The idea of a 'standard' may be contrasted with the quality of life, which takes into account not only the material standard of living, but also other more intangible aspects that make up human life, such as leisure, safety, cultural resources, social life, physical health, environmental quality issues etc. More complex means of measuring well-being must be employed to make such judgments, and these are very often political, thus controversial. Even between two nations or societies that have similar material standards of living, quality of life factors may in fact make one of these places more attractive to a given individual or group. However, there can be problems even with just using numerical averages to compare material standards of living, as opposed to, for instance, a Pareto index (a measure of the breadth of income or wealth distribution). Standards of living are perhaps inherently subjective. As an example, countries with a very small, very rich upper class and a very large, very poor lower class may have a high mean level of income, even though the majority of people have a low "standard of living". This mirrors the problem of poverty measurement, which also tends towards the relative. This illustrates how distribution of income can disguise the actual Standard of living. Likewise Country A, a perfectly socialist country with very low average per capita income would receive a higher score for having lower income inequality than Country B with a higher income inequality, even if the bottom of Country B's population distribution had a higher per capita income than Country A. Real examples of this include former East Germany compared to former West Germany or North Korea compared to South Korea. In each case, the socialist country has a low income descrepancy (and therefore would score high in that regard), but lower per capita incomes than a large majority of their neighboring counterpart. This can be avoided by using the measure of income at various percentiles of the population rather than the highly relative and controversial income inequality.

EFFECTOF THE TECHNOLOGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT The energy production (via power plants and coal burning) that is needed to support human life is increasing the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which can lead to rising global temperatures. The more automobiles in use on the planet also contribute to the pollution problem and the injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Some scientists fear that global warming will lead to rising sea levels and extreme weather conditions in the future. In order to support the growing population, forests are being destroyed at an alarming rate. Many countries are constantly cutting down their forests to clear land for farming and to make room for housing. The huge increases in size of the human population have resulted in a substantial degradation of environmental conditions. The changes have largely been characterized by deforestation, unsustainable harvesting of potentially renewable resources (such as wild animals and plants that are of economic importance), rapid mining of nonrenewable resources (such as metals and fossil fuels), pollution, and other ecological damages. At the same time that human populations have been increasing, there has also been a great intensification of per-capita environmental impacts. This has occurred through the direct and indirect consequences of increased resource use to sustain individual human beings and their social and technological infrastructure: meat production, fuel-burning, mining, air and water pollution, destruction of wild habitat, and so forth. This trend can be illustrated by differences in the intensity of energy use among human societies, which also reflect the changes occurring during the history of the evolution of sociocultural systems. The average per-capita consumption of energy in a hunting society is about 20 megajoules (millions of joules) per day (MJ/d), while it is 48 MJ/d in a primitive agricultural society, 104 MJ/d in advanced agriculture, 308 MJ/d for an industrializing society, and 1025 MJ/d for an advanced industrial society. The increases of per-capita energy usage, and of per-capita environmental impact, have been especially rapid during the past century of vigorous technological discoveries and economic growth. In fact, global per-capita economic productivity and energy consumption have both increased more rapidly during the twentieth century than has the human population. This pattern has been most significant in industrialized countries. In 1980, the average citizen of an industrialized country utilized 199 gigajoules (GJ, billions of joules) of energy, compared with only 17 GJ/yr in less-developed countries. Although industrialized countries only had 25% of the human population, they accounted for 80% of the energy use by human beings in 1980. Another illuminating comparison is that the world's richest 20% of people consume 86% of the goods and services delivered by the global economy, while the poorest 20% consumes just 1.3%. More specifically, the United States—the world's richest country as measured on a net, though not on a per-

capita, basis—consumes approximately 25% of the world's natural resources and produces some 75% of its hazardous wastes and 22% of its greenhouse gas emissions, while having only about 4.5% of the world's population. One of the most current and widely discussed factor which could lead to the ultimate end of existence of Earth and man is global warming and its devastating effects. Scientists have asked how fast the Earth is heating up, and how the warming effects on Earth may affect crops and climatic conditions. Several current trends clearly demonstrate that global warming is directly impacting on; rising sea levels, the melting of icecaps, and significant worldwide climatic changes. This paper will discuss the degree of destruction caused by global warming, contributing factors to warming, and finally, discuss what we can do to decrease the current rate of global warming. I would also like to present opposing viewpoints to the effects of the warming process. In my understanding, global warming represents a fundamental threat to all living things on earth.