New Internationalist Issue 280

The material that follows ha s been provided by New Internationalist

are you part of the problem...

Paved paradises and parking lots...

 

Percentage of the world's cars by country of ownership

Of the 607 million cars in the world in 1993, almost a third were in the US and another third in six other industrialised nations. ¹

Click on car to see full-size version

Most of the paved roads in the world have been built in the last four decades - yet in 1992 there were five times as many cars per kilometre of paved road as there were in 1953.

Cars per kilometre of paved road, 1992²

Forest as fuel...

People all over the world are taking direct action to save forests which continue to be decimated. In ten countries the forest is being destroyed at a rate of more than two percent a year. The reforestation going on in some Western countries is almost entirely of conifers rather than of traditionally diverse woods that include broad-leaved deciduous trees.

But who are the saints and who are the sinners here? Bangladesh, for example, has little alternative to wood to serve its energy needs - and at 4.4 gigajoules (4,400 million joules) its consumption of energy per person per year is the lowest in the world. Germany, meanwhile, may be replanting but it is the world's third-largest importer of energy. The US alone consumes a quarter of the world's energy.

Energy consumption per head (1991, in gigajoules) ²

...or part of the solution?

©Copyright: New Internationalist 1996

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