Perhaps some of the richer countries need to rally in support of the environment of some of the poorer countries. You only get one chance. If they can't do it, it would be nice to see those that can, step up to the plate for the sake of world environment and global impacts.

No. It is actually countries with strong democracies like Sweden, that vote to protect the environment.

The poor are exploited and suffer higher rates of asthma and cancer in non democracies like (now) the US and South American banana republics, because industry controls governmental decision making, to benefit itself by writing their own legislation.

An example would be the NHTSA rules the auto companies wrote in the 80's to fight back against the fuel efficiency rules that Carter had set up, that allow our auto companies produce the most unsafe, polluting and inefficient cars in the world.

"US safety performance since creation of NHTSA

In the mid 1960s when the framework was established for US vehicle safety regulations, the US auto market was an oligopoly, with just three companies (GM, Ford, and Chrysler) controlling 85% of the market. At that time, the USA had safer traffic than any country in the world, whether measured by the number of traffic deaths per thousand vehicles, or the number of traffic deaths per 100 million miles.

Although a system of uniform auto safety performance and equipment regulations had been in place in Europe since 1958, the US did not seek to adopt or harmonize with these ECE regulations, which have since been adopted by virtually all industrialized countries outside North America. Compared to the ECE regulations, US regulations are fundamentally different in philosophy, content, emphasis, and enforcement protocol.

Vehicles conforming to the internationalized (originally European) ECE regulations are allowed or required throughout the entire rest of the world, but such vehicles are illegal in the US because they don't conform to the US regulations.

Despite the evolution of the North American auto market to include most of the world's major automakers, and the ongoing proliferation of US safety regulations, the previously-existing market oligopoly still exerts strong influence: US vehicle equipment and construction regulations are based almost entirely on SAE standards, which were written almost entirely by US automakers.

The results of this regulatory philosophy and practice do not support a safety-related basis for the prohibition on ECE vehicles: despite the sizeable auto safety lead enjoyed by the USA in the 1960s, by 2002 the US had sunk to 16th place(behind Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Iceland, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland) in terms of deaths per thousand vehicles.

In terms of deaths per 100 million miles, the USA had dropped from first place to tenth place. With the partial exception of Canada, all of the countries achieving better safety results either require or permit vehicles built to comply with the ECE regulations, not the US regulations."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Highway_Traffic_Safety_Administration

what a ridiculous conclusion to draw from the information.

um, it could just be me, but has anyone on that research considered the simplicity of Masser's "Hierarchy of Means"?

Its no news flash that poor people are too busy with simple survival than to sit around contemplating something as trivial to their day-to-day living and as out of reach to them as global warming. It doesn't take a bunch of silly PhD's to realize that...

DB Burns has the right take on this. Desperate people are focused on their immediate survival, and it does them no good to focus on the long term implications of their actions if doing so means they are less likely to live out the short term.

Once people have a level of stability in their lives they are then much more receptive to concerns about quality of life and sustainability.

For the benefit of the world, the affluent nations must help make it possible for the lesser developed countries to achieve improved quality of life. People with secure incomes tend to have fewer children, lessening demand for resources, and are able to invest in more expensive technologies that can be more sustainable.

Part of the problem also arises from the transition of traditional cultures of subsistence farming into the modern economy of money and industrialized products. Many traditional societies are very sustainable, but the introduction of modern materials destabilizes the culture and adds things that are not biodegradable, while decreased mortality rates lead to populations outstripping the resource base. Since fully industrialized cultures have not solved this problem it is a bit hypocritical to place blame for this on lesser developed cultures who did not bring this situation on themselves.

The main thing that the study's abstract seems to be saying is that people with less money are not a big fan of additional taxes. It does not really tell you that much about how poor countries favor environmental policy compared to other policy objectives say health or education. For that, you would really need to see how they rank environmental taxes vs. other types of taxes. Looking at rank gives you more info about how folks value the environment compared to other things which seems a far more interesting question.

@d.b. burns
Aah, you are falling for the common fallacy that worrying about the environment is a luxury of the rich.

This is very very far from the truth. For example, if you're a country that can't afford to import tons of oil and relies heavily on hydropower (eg. the Domincan Republic), you NEED to protect your watershed or you're screwed.

If you are a person living in the Niger Delta, you really don't want all that natural gas flaring in your back yard causing health problems that you can't pay to resolve.

The thing isn't that the poor don't care about their environment, in fact I would say that a lot of environmental issues in developing countries are social justice issues. Rather a big problem is that in weaker democracies, the people who are suffering the consequences of persistent environmental degradation don't have the ability to seek redress and/or get change.

Think back to how the Clean Water Act was passed in the U.S. in the 70's. A lot of environmental activism + a free press that could report on shocking things like the Cuyahoga River catching fire + a vibrant democracy.