Experts' Tier FINALE: Environmental Protections vs. Resource Extraction

.. . Not only is there no visible correlation between economic well being and percentage of land protected by national parks, its also apparent that conserving the environment is not the best way to fight poverty either. In Africa, the nations with the highest percentage of land protected by national parks are nations that are doing very poorly economically, while those that have less than 5% of its landmass protected by national parks, nations like Egypt and South Africa, are much better off than the rest of Africa. http://en.wikipedia.org...In Europe, the nations with the most amount of landmass protected are Iceland, France, Slovakia, Montenegro, UK (an early industrializer), and Norway. .. . All of which are nations that are riddled with economic problemsThose countries have 5% or more of its landmass protected by national parks, those with less than 5% include Switzerland, Germany, Spain, and Greece. http://en.wikipedia.org...Same thing can be found in Asia and the America's. Point is, nations that are the most protective of their environment are not necessarily the most economically well off nations. There appears to be no correlation between the two. 2) Far better ways to improve society than environmental protectionThere are far better ways to fight poverty than environmental protection, such as providing electricity, making healthcare widespread, education for all, clean water and sanitation, etc. . http://plancanada.ca...http://www.unesco.org...http://www.lasvegassun.com...Governments though cannot get the money/capital to pour funding into all of those things if they dont have a stable economy. Thats where industrialization + resource extraction comes in. It opens the door for the government to being able to fund all these things to improve society that it didnt when it was still a developing nation. 3) Necessity for Developing Nations to industrialize"as time passes and more and more nations begin to pollute, the situation is deteriorating towards a crisis point. Sure, industrialization may have worked in the past, but it cannot be a solution anymore. It's just not safe. "Industrialization isnt a road you can or cant take though, its the ONLY path a country can take. .. . No country in history has ever leaped straight from developing nation to modernized, you HAVE to go through industrialization. .. . In order to learn to run, you have to try walk and fall down a few times before you get the hang of it, you cant just jump from crawling to running, and the same analogy can be said about nations that are still developing to becoming a modernized one "the longer pollution continues, the more its impacts are felt. "We can fix that though, environmental damage isnt something that's always irreversible. Technology itself is always allowing for people to get more from less (more efficient engines increase MPG, lightbulbs run on less electricity) while also allowing for society to fix environmental accidents that do happen (ability to clean up oil spills and nuclear power plant failures), heck modernization itself is the cleaner version of industrialization. "Unfortunately, the benefits of development rarely impact the middle class. "It certainly does in the long term. Industrialization opens the door to modernization, which is where the middle class really begins to take off and where the government finally starts to get money to improve the Middle Class4) Where industrialization hasnt worked very well"In Nigeria, ‘where hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil have been pumped since the 1950s, 85 percent of revenues accrue to only 1 percent of the population" In other words, the elites pocket the wealth, and the poor stay poor. The middle class does not become wealthier in these developing nations, at least not significantly, and so there is no substantial increase in the taxable population. "The reason why its not working well in Nigeria is because Nigeria's government has been corrupt as hell since it became its own nation. .. . You cant look at the worst example of a nation undergoing industrialization and point to it like its the status quo, a lot of other nations have made great successful strides in improvement by industrializing, such as South Korea in the 1970's, The Middle East in the second half of the 20th century in general, etc. "I would like Con to produce a credible warrant for why industrialization is actually necessary. Just because it has helped nations advance in the past, that does not mean it is the ONLY way forward. "There simply is no other way. No other nation has jumped from still developing straight to modernized. Industrialization is to nations what adolescence is to people. Its a messy and lengthy transition from a helpless state to a functioning one that you cant just skip over. You cant go straight from being a kid to being an adult, theres a transition thats involved, and the same is true for nations that want to go from still developing to modernized. "The topic is specific to "resource extraction. " It is possible to industrialize, as China is doing, through manufacturing, which is not itself extraction"Theyre still doing a lot of resource extraction to be able to even manufacture in the first place. China is sitting on 11% of the world's coal which they need for electricity to power all the manufacturing they have going on over there, and without that cheap source of power China would still be in an economic state similar to Vietnam. 5) Other arguments"if we take Con's remarks to imply that extraction promote quality of life, we only need to reference my R1 health and poverty impacts to see that this notion is totally fallacious. "Its the long term effects that industrialization has that promotes quality of life, since it opens the door to modernization and a developed, well off middle class. You wont get that with environmental protection. " nor does it say that environmental protections would necessarily impeded industrialization to the point where it would stop the process entirely. "It wouldnt stop it completely but It sure would slow down the process down enough for industrialization to last several more generations that it would have. .. That then delays achieving modernization and delays the government from getting enough tax money to even sink into improving the livelihood of its own people. "The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and Colombia, for example, together account for 10 percent of the world's remaining intact forests. Not surprisingly, these and other countries in which resource conflicts are raging are home to some of the world's biodiversity hotspots. "Youre confusing the effects of rampant government corruption with resource extraction. You can have resource extraction without fueling conflicts over this resources if the government isnt corrupt. "Ample resource endowments can have negative economic consequences, as countries grow overly dependent on these resources, allocate inadequate capital and labor to other sectors…and underinvest in critical social areas such as education and health. "Thats because resource extraction is meant to just get the engine of a nation's economy running, its not meant to be sustainable or the solution. Unfortunately a lot of nations with corrupt governments (like in Africa and countries in Latin America and Asia) dont understand that resource extraction is simply the key to starting to build a wealthier nation, not the solution itself. "when we look at incidents like the chemical spill is W. VA. here in the U. S. we can see that without environmental protections, extraction and its dependent industries (like waste repositories) actually harm the environment, endanger health, and harm economies"The reason why that particular incident happened in West Virginia is because some idiot thought it would be okay to build a coal dumping plant upriver from the drinking water harvesting plant. That incident wasnt a failure of resource extraction, it was a failure of common sense. And technology itself allowed us to fix that mess-up along with other environmental disasters we inadvertently cause, they arent irreversible. 6) My Final PointIn order for governments to not only be able to protect the environment and pour funding into education, sanitation, and other things that actually help people, the government needs money, and lots of it. Thats the one thing that governments in developing nations dont have though money, and the easiest, quickest way for governments in developing nations to start getting substantial income is to pursue policies in industrialization, to build up its economy so that the government actually can get a tax base. The quickest way to pursue industrialization in countries with lots of people, is resource extraction, since its the best and easiest option for most developing nations to pursue.