Economic growth v environmental protection

Should our first priority be worldwide economic growth or reducing the rate of global warming?

This is increasingly seen as a major dilemma facing the world today. Population growth and economic expansion may lead to greater emissions of gases which are harmful to the future of our planet.

Is worldwide economic growth a good thing? In general, it undoubtedly is. It’s a perfectly natural and reasonable ambition for people living in remote rural impoverishment to want to better themselves by moving to towns and cities where they can get better-paid jobs and so raise their living standards. People naturally want to improve life chances for themselves and their families. Globalisation is often demonised these days but if it means more children growing up with better access to schools and health care then surely it is a good thing. Economics, after all, is not a zero-sum equation.

On the other hand, many scientists warn that continued population growth and economic expansion worldwide will mean more greenhouse gases which will lead to global warming and a real threat to the future of our planet. China and India, both countries with over 1 billion people, have seen massive economic growth in recent years and this usually means ever-greater greenhouse gas emissions: China’s massive coal industry is an excellent example. Scientists may disagree about the rates of global warming and about how far it is man-made, but the existence of the danger seems inescapable.

There thus seems to be an intractable dilemma facing our contemporary world: human betterment versus global disaster. The desire for economic growth and higher living standards is both natural and hard to deny. There are those, however, who say that if population growth and economic expansion continue unabated, the whole world is doomed.

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