U.S. Given Poor Marks on the Environment

Another bottom ranking score pertaining to life and health A new international ranking of environmental performance puts the United States at the bottom of the Group of 8 industrialized nations and 39th among the 149 countries on the list. And the limbo rock goes on, "how low can we go..." As common sense in science is lost with the continued stagnation of our energy base and deep troubling theoretical foundational issues in physics, so too, Civilization's Survival Parameters fly out of sight, out of mind, along with the values and morals inherent within new scientific understanding which new energy systems would reveal. Scientific Stagnation bodes an ill wind to evolution, sustainability, and survival as "cycles of humiliation, dumbing us down, violence & resource wars" join hands with global warming and ecological imbalance to precipitate the historical "rise and fall" - a Tsunami accelerating toward us with a far more spectacular event than the legends and myths of 'Atlantis and Lemuria"........ had more people known that Energy from Corn (or going backwards to a dimwitted concept of radioactive nuclear power application ) sounded a wee bit kindergartenish and senile for the twenty first century......the Future may have had a chance.



January 23, 2008
U.S. Given Poor Marks on the Environment
By FELICITY BARRINGER
WASHINGTON — A new international ranking of environmental performance puts the United States at the bottom of the Group of 8 industrialized nations and 39th among the 149 countries on the list.
European nations dominate the top places in the ranking, which evaluates sanitation, greenhouse gas emissions, agricultural policies, air pollution and 20 other measures to formulate an overall score, with 100 the best possible.
The top 10 countries, with scores of 87 or better, were led by Switzerland, Sweden, Norway and Finland. The others at the top were Austria, France, Latvia, Costa Rica, Colombia and New Zealand, the leader in the 2006 version of the analysis, which is conducted by researchers at Yale and Columbia Universities.
“We are putting more weight on climate change,” said Daniel Esty, the report’s lead author, who is the director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. “Switzerland is the most greenhouse gas efficient economy in the developed world,” he said, in part because of its use of hydroelectric power and its transportation system, which relies more on trains than individual cars or trucks.
The United States, with a score of 81.0, he noted, “is slipping down,” both because of low scores on three different analyses of greenhouse gas emissions and a pervasive problem with smog. The country’s performance on a new indicator that measures regional smog, he said, “is at the bottom of the world right now.”
He added, “The U.S. continues to have a bottom-tier performance in greenhouse gas emissions.” ...full text