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We Must Work Together to Save Spaceship Earth

Have you heard the saying, "When it comes to environmental problems, there are no national borders"? What that means is that, for example, while pollution in a river may be a problem for one local area or one country alone, global warming is a worldwide problem.

In other words, carbon dioxide (CO2) gas given off by one country not only makes the temperature of that country higher, but by adding to the thickness of the earth's "sweater," the entire earth gets warmer. So, if the people of a country were to say, "We don't care if our country makes tons and tons of CO2," all of the rest of the world would be troubled.

As you can guess, industrialized countries, like Japan and the United States, where people lead a?more technically advanced life, produce much more CO2 than developing countries, where people rely on agriculture (farming and raising animals) and work harder for their comfort with less dependence on technology.

Let's compare how much CO2 is produced by countries around the world using data (information collected) in the year 2000. The largest producer of CO2 is the US, which contributed 24 percent of the world's total CO2 emissions (gas released into the air). China comes second with about 12%, followed by Russia (6%), Japan (5%), India (5%) and Germany (3%). The total CO2 emissions from these top six countries are more than half the world's total. For example, Japan, a small archipelago (a group of islands) in Asia, alone produces larger amounts of CO2 than the whole African Continent or the whole South American Continent! Although China and India also release large amounts of CO2, this is not because the industrial development in those countries has raised the standards of living to the point that the people live a more technically advanced life, but rather it is because of their large population.

Let's look at the data on the average amount of CO2 emissions per person in each country. Again, the US comes first, followed by Australia, Canada, Russia, Germany, Britain and Japan. So, in comparison to a person living in Japan, for example, a person in China produces less than one-quarter the amount of CO2, and a person living in India produces only one-ninth.

There are those where people emit twice as much CO2 as the global average. And so if someday the rest of the world were to live like people in these high CO2 emitting countries, like Japan and America, and produce as much CO2 as the people there, what do you think would happen?

In fact, many developing countries are working hard to industrialize, in hopes that their people can live like those in more developed countries. And of course nobody has the right to tell them they can't. The population of less developed countries will continue to soar and therefore CO2 emissions will rise even higher.

What is clear is that there are no defined borders between advanced and developing countries and so we all have to work together to reduce the amount of CO2 that is produced. The advanced countries are responsible for the increase in CO2 up until now. Therefore, those countries should reduce their CO2 emissions as much as possible, and work to support developing countries with money and more efficient technologies. There's no escaping the problem of global warming. Each and every country of the world is part of the crew of "Spaceship Earth."

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