Global Environmental Issues Essay

Global environmental issues, such as climatic change, global warming, pollution, species extinction and destruction of tropical rain forests hold unique place among other major international problems as it is one area that has transformative, comprehensive and long term impact on the future of entire world. For over a decade now the subject of these issues have become the common platform for intellectuals citizens, scientists, social organizations, and political and economic leaders from different parts of world to converge, assess and determine the possible ways to contain and mitigate its threat, that poses an unprecedented risk to the functioning and perhaps very survival of humanity. Climatic change, rain forest destruction and global warming are all interrelated issues, borne from same cause of increase in population and consumption. The empirical instances of these problems have been already factually corroborated in late in 1980s and early 1990s (Paterson, 1996). The years since 1987 started to show the veracity of these predictions as global average annual temperature soared higher every passing year and 1998 became the warmest year in the recorded years. More ominously, the second and third most warmest years in recorded history were 1995 and 1993, confirming to scientists, environmentalists and people that the rise in global temperature was not a sudden phenomena, or an aberration, but a systematic process that would compound in the absence of any effective policy and action (Johansen, 2002). Meanwhile, the destruction of Amazon and African rain forests have further compounded the problem, causing the environmental conditions to deteriorate more rapidly. Issues of climatic change and global warming have assumed international proportion as people have started to realized that the warming is a consequence of the largely unstructured paradigm of development, consumption, and growth followed over past 200 years, a problem that has been deeply embedded in the socio-cultural and economic system of the world (Uzawa, 2003). Despite the fact that there are many people over the world who would readily associate United States as the whole sole perpetrator of emission of greenhouse gases and global warming, United States has been among the leading campaigners to instituting policy change and corrective actions on the most comprehensive and global level to tackle the problem. The threats arising from global warming are bound to affect US’ economic and public interests with same intensity as they would affect that of any other country (Fleagle, 1994). Changing sea-level, intensification of storms, and climatic change have presented real threats for the United States and it is pressed for a domestic as well international solution (Uzawa, 2003). The problems with US are that its complex economic interests, industrial structure and societal framework doesn’t allow it to implement any drastic measures that may force a possible economic collapse (Victor, 2001). Under these strenuous complications, the US government is trying to come up with a policy for large scale institutional change and economic streamlining that aims to incorporate environmental costs as part of the economy and the society.