The Recession’s Green Lining

It may be difficult to see a bright side to the global economic recession, especially if you’re among the millions who have lost their jobs, their homes or their businesses. But thankfully, as painful as the current situation is for most people, the news isn’t all doom and gloom. Things are looking up for the environment and human health in areas that have been long befouled by pollution as financially strapped factories begin to shut their doors.

From Newsweek:

It is no coincidence that some of the dirtiest industrial operations are falling victim to the global recession. Over the past two decades, much of the world’s manufacturing moved to where pollution standards are little more than mild suggestions. Since small, corner-cutting, inefficient facilities tend to both flout pollution laws and be most vulnerable to a sudden drop in demand, the global recession has hit such operations especially hard.

Thousands of factories in China’s Pearl River Delta have shut their doors since late last year, for instance; output of autos, electronics and other goods from factories in Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez, Monterrey and Toluca has fallen so sharply that the amount of cargo trucked across the U.S. border has dropped 40 percent.

In India, enough small steel-rolling mills around Delhi have closed that levels of sulfur dioxide (which forms acid rain) fell 85 percent in October 2008 compared with a year earlier. The recession is bringing a green dividend in the developed world, too. Reduced economic activity is projected to cut Europe’s emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief man-made greenhouse gas, by 100 million tons in 2009, and the United States’ by about the same amount.

So, while human progress – in the form of environmentally damaging industry and development – is temporarily hampered, the earth gets to take a breather. The key to making the best of this situation is to use this time to focus on cleaner economic activity so that those polluting factories don’t pop right back up again when the economy recovers.

Link [Newsweek]
Photo credit: Flickr user Taras Kalapun

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