How the economy is the underlying cause of the Climate Change that we have seen today (A Causal Analysis Paper)

Essay by froction88College, UndergraduateA, May 2007

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Economics and Climate Change: The Downward Spiral

When society, it's people and it's leaders act as a unified whole, in which their actions not only benefit themselves, but the people around them as well, then most problems that we have faced in this world today would probably cease to exist. Unfortunately, in most cases, it is the exact opposite; people's primary concern is themselves. "It's not like one person is going to make a difference" is what a lot of people think when it comes to making certain decisions, especially environmentally friendly ones. Well, one problem with this is when just about everyone starts thinking with this mentality because then, you would definitely have a dysfunctional society. The worst case scenario, though, is when the big executives and leaders of that society, that have power and control over industries and large portions of the economy (if not all of it), start thinking this way.

In any firm, the major goal behind everything that takes place is profitability, even for the government in many cases (e.g. taxes), and that's what has brought about this type of mentality in the business world, which has only managed to lead to more serious problems.

Let's take a look at two different countries, Egypt and Belgium. Right away we see a great difference in the fact that Egypt (995,000 sq. km) is thirty times the size of Belgium (33,000 sq. km) and that Egypt also has seven times more inhabitants than Belgium (The World Bank). Although, if we were to take a look at the economics of each country, you would see that Belgium makes four times more revenue from production in their GDP (364.7 billion) than Egypt does (89.3 billion). Furthermore, Belgium also has four times the amount of CO2...