Yale and Columbia universities have just published their 2008 Environmental Performance Index, which grades 149 countries on their sustainability. Here’s the press release and the summary for policymakers. According to the Index, the most environmentally sustainable country in the world is – ready? – Switzerland. Then Sweden, Norway and Finland. The United States comes in at number 39. China is at number 105; India even lower, at 120.
Now when you stop and actually think about these “data”, you begin to experience a creeping sense that something strange is going on here. Start from the recognition that climate change is far and away the most significant global issue that the Index looks at, and then ask yourself: how can the United States be 66 places above China – when US emissions are 19.5 tons of CO2 per person compared to less than 4 tons per capita in China (source: WRI EarthTrends)? How can China score so much better than India, when Indian per capita emissions are between a third and a quarter of those of China? And what is Finland doing in the top four countries with per capita CO2 emissions of more than 14 tons per person? What on earth is going on here? Were the researchers drunk?
Dan Esty, were he here, would presumably point out in a tone of hurt sincerity that his Index aggregates numerous indicators other than per capita emissions. Indoor air pollution, irrigation stress, pesticide regulation, access to sanitation, habitat protection and many others are all part of the mix. Plus there are other climate indicators besides emissions per capita; industrial carbon intensity and emissions per unit of electricity generated are also used to gauge climate friendliness.
But that’s exactly why this “Index” is so pernicious – and deserves to be roundly derided as the crude exercise in bullshit that it is. The point about Esty’s indicator set is that countries score badly for being poor. Notice anything about the bottom 20 countries on the index? How about the fact that 16 of them are in Africa?
Of course if you’re poor, you’re more likely to lack access to sanitation, suffer from poor indoor air quality or struggle in combating infectious disease (another metric used by the Index). But much more significant is the fact that the world’s poorest people and countries are those that tread lightest on the planet in terms of their consumption and carbon footprints. If anything, they deserve to be consuming more of the earth’s resources, including atmospheric space.
Yet what Esty’s extraordinarily misleading Index does is to convey the opposite message: that’s it’s the poor who are most at fault in driving environmental unsustainability. Words fail me.
