Reducing Carbon Dioxide Emissions
Scientists estimate that to slow global warming we need to reduce substantially worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. Ways to reduce carbon dioxide include increasing energy efficiency and switching from coal and oil to renewable energy sources.
Actions around the world:
In 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit, over 150 countries signed a climate change treaty aimed at stabilizing carbon dioxide emissions from industrialized nations by the year 2000. The Solar Electric Light Fund, a U.S. nonprofit group, is helping install small solar power stations in communities in Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka, reducing the demand for fossil fuel plants. North Carolina has organized more efficient school bus routes, saving millions of dollars and reducing carbon dioxide emissions by thousands of tons. With the help of an Indian university, the village of Pura, India, has developed a small community power plant that converts manure to methane--used to generate electricity for the entire village. Southern California Edison, a power company, has pledged to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 20% by the year 2010. It has donated 1 million compact fluorescent lightbulbs to customers; it also offers them free home insulation and rebates if they buy energy-efficient appliances.
Today, in a world with abundant food, more than 700 million people are chronically undernourished. Over the next 20 years, the world's population will probably double. The global food supply would need to double just to stay even, but to triple for the larger population to be fed adequately. Meanwhile, we are approaching limits in arable land and productivity and are employing practices that are destroying the soil's capacity to produce food.
Some see biotechnology as the answer to the problem of enabling this much larger population to feed itself. But biotechnology, if by this we mean crops engineered to contain new genes, is not essential. It could play a minor and useful role in developing new agricultural products, but other factors -- including other kinds of breeding technologies -- will be much more important than transgenic crops in determining whether we meet this challenge. It would be a tragedy if other necessary actions were not taken because of a mistaken belief that genetic engineering is some sort of a panacea for hunger. Some of the reasons biotechnology should not be relied on to enable the world to feed itself are outlined below.
Throughout this paper, the expression ‘elderly’ denotes people aged 65 years and over and ‘old old’ indicates people aged 80 years and over. These subgroups of the world population are expected to grow more rapidly than others. During the 30 years between 1990 and 2020, the global population is expected to increase by 52%, but its elderly population will increase by 115% and the ‘old old’ population by 134%. By the year 2020, more than 3.5% of the North American, and 4.4% of the European population is projected to be aged 80 years and over.
The fastest increase in the elderly population will take place in the Asian region. Whereas the elderly population of Sweden and of the United Kingdom is expected to increase by 33 and 45%, respectively, the corresponding increase in a number of Asian countries will be between 200 and 400%.
