500 000 more Americans die every year compared to equivalent economies. The death rate in America is higher for several causes of death than in Europe.
US life expectancy fell from 78.8 to 76.1 between 2019 to 2021. In all other developed countries it continued to increase.
In 2020 the EU reported 5800 overdose deaths in a population of 330 million. America reported 68 000 overdose deaths in a similar population of 440 million.
In 2021 there were 26 000 murders in America compared to just a few hundred in most European countries with larger populations.
The US car crash death rate is four times that of Germany.
Americans are nearly twice as likely to die in fires compared to in Western Europe.
Relevance to A-level sociology
This material is relevant to global development, an option within A-level sociology.
These statistics suggest that social development does not automatically follow on from economic development. America is one of the richest countries on earth, but its social development is relatively retarded. The money made in America isn’t being used to benefit ordinary people by making the country a safer place to live!
With global military expenditure at an all time high, the prospects for peace and development are looking bleak!
World military expenditure stood at $2240 billion in 2022, an all time record high.
Global military expenditure fell in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, then rose from 1999 to 2010, fell slightly in the next few years and then saw a steady year on year increase from 2013 to 2022, increasing by a total of 19% during the decade to 2022.
2021 to 2022 saw the the sharpest rise, with an increase of 3.7%, fuelled largely by the War on Ukraine.
Ukraine’s military expenditure rose by 640% in 2022 to $44 billion, compared to a previous (approximate) $6 billion a year before the Russian invasion. That $44 billion does not include military aid from other countries, estimated to be around the $30 billion mark in 2022.
Russia’s military expenditure rose by almost 10% to nearly $90 billion in 2022, making it the world’s third largest spender on the military.
Military Expenditure as usual
While the war in Ukraine has obviously had a massive impact in Ukraine as military expenditure now accounts for a third of its GDP (compared to 2.5% in the United Kingdom for example), as well as in Russia and many other nations through their giving military aid to Ukraine, when we look at things globally the impact of the war on Ukraine on overall expenditure has been relatively small.
Granted, the increase for last year is greater than previous years, but it’s not a massive break with the trend of steadily increasing military expenditure over the last two decades.
The worrying thing is (at least it’s worrying if you are a fan of world peace) is that in terms of overall military expenditure, the increase in expenditure caused by the war in Ukraine is really just a drop in the ocean: around a $100 billion increase is not a lot compared to a total usual annual spend of $2200 billion.
The world’s biggest military spenders
The United States remains the largest military spender, having spent an astronomical $877 billion on it military in 2022, accounting for 39% of the total global spend in 2022.
China comes second on the list, but is a long way behind America with an annual expenditure of $292 billion, a third less than America’s expenditure.
Russia is third in the war league tables, but even with the war on Ukraine it spends three times less than China (1/10th that of America), at just under $100 billion annually, and slightly more than Saudi Arabia and India who come in fourth and fifth positions.
The United Kingdom has the highest military expenditure in Europe at almost $70 billion in 2022, and at 2.3% of its GDP, it spends twice as much on its military proportionately compared to most other European nations except for France.
The United States and China spend more on the militaries than all other nations combined.
Relevance to A-Level Sociology
The War in Ukraine has dominated the news throughout 2022 and the conflict has severely retarded development in the country both in the short term because of loss of life, injury, emigration and destruction of infrastructure, but also in the long term as tens of billions of dollars have been spent on the conflict, diverted from what could have been positive investment in social development in health, employment and education, for example.
But stepping back from the immediate shock of this particular conflict and just looking at it in terms of wider military expenditure we are reminded of the huge sums we spend globally on constant preparedness for war, and even Russia is something of a minor player in terms of its own expenditure, spending three times less than China and 10 times less than the United States.
The United States spends so much on its military that it has been able to provide billions in aid to Ukraine without it being a significant dent in its military budget.
If either one of those two countries decides to wage war against a lesser power in the future, they can dwarf the harm Russia has done in Ukraine, moreover, imagine how much good even a tenth of global military expenditure could do if it were devoted to positive development: $200 billion more on global health, education and employment initiatives could transform the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
Instead we choose to spend more than $2 trillion on being prepared to kill each other.
It’s a stark reminder of just how far off global peace and enlightenment we are, and how small global development agendas are compared to the military agendas of the world’s largest nation states.
Signposting
This material is mainly relevant to the Globalisation and Global Development module, which is sometimes taught as part of the second year in A-level sociology (AQA specification).
War and Conflict are the main things which prevent positive economic and social development, and this update is a depressing reminder that in terms of military expenditure the world seems to be getting less peaceful.
The United States recently introduced a huge climate change bill which promotes investment in green energy through indirect subsidies. This bill represents one the largest state-level investments in green energy in history and seems to suggest we are moving away neoliberal models of development.
The green-subsidies are included in the broader Inflation Reduction Act which came into force in August 2022 and is primarily designed to tackle climate change through boosting the country’s green energy sector, mostly through indirect subsidies in the form of tax credits.
The main aims of the bill are to reduce carbon emissions and create millions of new jobs in the green energy sector, in industries such as manufacturing solar panels, wind turbines, heat pumps and carbon capture technologies.
The bill is also designed to help the U.S. reduce its reliance on imports from China, in a process it calls ‘onshoring’, and there is hope that it will encourage trillions of dollars in private investment into manufacturing green technologies.
To give a specific example, the U.S. now offers a tax credit of $7500 for buyers of most electric and hydrogen powered cards. However, this is conditional on final assembly taking place in the U.S. or other countries which have free-trade treaties with the U.S. such as Canada and Mexico.
There are also a ‘domestic-content’ rules: the more components and raw materials sourced in America, the higher the tax-credit, but there are no credits available if if critical minerals have been sourced from ‘foreign entities of concern’ such as China, Russia or Iran.
It is estimated that the IRA will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10% more than if it hadn’t been passed.
In the six months since the bill was passed there has already been $89 billion of investment into the green energy sector, and 100 000 new jobs created. Companies such as BMW, Honda, and Tesla have either moved manufacturing of batteries to the U.S. or are considering a move.
The end of Neoliberalism?
This policy shift feels like we are moving away from the neoliberal development model in which nation states do less. Here we have the United States government actively supporting, selectively, green technology.
Maybe climate change is such an important global issue that we need co-ordination at the level of the nation state.
Limitations of the Climate Change Bill
Indirect subsidies are protectionist and they distort the free market.
Even after only six months green tech companies are already pulling out of Europe and seeking to relocate the the United States, meaning that this policy is hurting U.S. allies as well as its perceived ‘enemies’ such as China.
When nation states provide subsidies it can promote something of a ‘race to the bottom’ among competitors, with the EU already considering its own Green Deal Industrial Plan, simplifying regulation for green companies.
The bill potentially violates World Trade Organisation free trade rules, and the EU is challenging it on these grounds.
And let’s not forget, where manufacturing is concerned, green energy isn’t necessarily than green: there is a lot of metal and plastic in wind turbines and batteries, and a lot of toxic-chemical processes that go into their manufacture, and we haven’t exactly figured out a pollution free strategy for storing used-batteries when they are past their use-by date.
In other words, light regulation now might not be an effective way of promoting green development in the greener sense of the world.
While lowering emissions will benefit developing countries more (because they are more exposed to the extreme consequences of global warming) this kind of development is all about developed countries in economic terms.
The bill only passed the senate by one single vote and it had to be ‘disguised’ in a larger ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ which included a range of other measures on healthcare and tax.
There is still plenty of political resistance to state-subsidies for green technology, meaning the bill could be watered down or countered by subsidies for petrochemical industries in future years.
Many new nations in the global south struggled to find national unity following independence because of ethnic and religious divisions within their national borders.
Most countries classified as developing today were once colonies of European countries and achieved independence at some point during the 20th century.
The development of nationalism followed a very different path to that of European nationalisms, and was very much influenced by the politics of many years of colonial rule.
During the 16th to 19th centuries European powers travelled to the Americas, Asia and Africa and subjected those regions to colonial rule, setting up colonial administrations, sometimes staffed by a mixture of Europeans and willing allies from the colonized regions (who were often given a European education to facilitate these roles).
When the Europeans set up their administrations they did not take into account existing political and ethnic divisions among the local populations and so each colony was a collection of peoples and maybe old local states brought together under and arbitrary boundary created by external powers.
The straight lines of African borders are a result of European colonists ‘carving up’ Africa themselves, with no respect for existing ethnic groups.
When former colonies achieved independence they often found it hard to create a shared national identity because of these divisions and in the 2020s many postcolonial states still struggle with internal rivalries and conflicts and competing claims to political authority.
In some countries nationalism based on shared ethnic identity did play a significant role in helping to achieve independence, such as in Rwanda and Kenya, but this was often limited to small groups of urban elites and intellectuals.
Many nationalist movements emerged in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s which promoted independence from European domination, but once liberation had been achieved the leaders of these movement in practically every country found it almost impossible to create a sense of national unity. It didn’t help that these leaders had usually been educated in Europe or the USA and so there was a vast gap between them and ordinary people in their countries.
Many African countries saw overt conflicts around ethnic and religion divisions and some ended up in overt Civil War, such as in Sudan, Zaire and Nigeria.
Nationalism in Sudan
Sudan is a good example of how one post colonial nation struggled to find national unity given the ethnic and religious divisions following independence.
About 40% of the population were Muslim Arab, mainly habiting the north, while the rest were mainly black and followed traditional religions with a minority being Christian, mainly in the south.
Following independence, Arab Nationalists took power and started a programme of national integration based on Islam as the national religion Arabic as the national language, which 60% of the population did not speak and saw the new government as imposing a national identity on them.
Civil war broke out in 1955 between the new government in north and the south, and it wasn’t until 1972 that a peace accord granted some level of autonomy to the south, but these were annulled in 1983, leading to more conflict until 2005 when a new agreement finally granted the south regional autonomy.
After a few years a referendum in 2011 gave the south full autonomy and a new nation: South Sudan was created, but disputes over the border continued.
However the sad story doesn’t end there: in 2013 a further civil war broke out within South Sudan which lasted five years until a power sharing agreement was reached in 2018, then a coalition government formed in 2020.
Colonialism: A barrier to national identity?
Many ex colonies struggled to create a clear sense of nationhood following colonialism and independence, and in some cases, like Sudan, the original independence nations fragmented into smaller nations, reflecting the intense political and ethnic differences within these ex-colonies.
The process of establishing nation states has gone much more smoothly in those areas outside of Europe which were never fully colonised or which had high degrees of ethnic unity, for example in China, Japan, Korea and Thailand.
Signposting
This material is relevant to students taking the Global Development option as part of the second year of A-level sociology.
It might also be relevant to the the topic of nationalism and identity within the Culture and Identity module.
Progress towards universal access to clean water has stalled because of climate change and the inability of governments to provide infrastructure.
2 Billion people in the world still do not have access to clean drinking water, with most of these living in Sub-Sharan Africa and Central and Southern Asia, according to a recent State of the World’s Water Report issued by the World Health Organisation (1)
The proportions of people with access to contamination free drinking water varies considerably by region: in Europe and North America 98% of the population have access, but in Sub-Saharan Africa only 36% of people have access to clean drinking water.
Access to safe water supplies is Millennium Development Goal number 6, and we have made progress in the last 2 decades, with the proportion of the global population with access to safely managed water rising from 62% in the year 2000 to 74% by 2020.
However, progress is stalling, and the United Nations realises that we probably NOT going to reach the goal of achieving safe and affordable access to clean drinking water for EVERYBODY by 2030, in fact by 2030 they predict that 1.6 billion people will lack access to clean water, and higher numbers will lack access to decent hygiene facilities.
Why this matters for development
Drinking dirty water is one of the main reasons people get ill, which directly reduces life expectancy, but also the capacity for children to school and get an education or adults to go to work.
There is also a dimension to this. In situations, usually rural areas, where there is no clean, piped water to towns or villages and people have to walk miles to fetch water, it is usually women who do the fetching, in up to 90% of cases in some parts of rural India.
This improving water supplies would improve health, education, work prospects and gender equality.
Why do people lack access to clean drinking water?
Climate change seems to be the main culprit, and there are different reasons for lack of access in different parts of the world. In Subsaharan African the main reason is persistent drought: there simply isn’t enough clean water year-round for the populations in some areas.
in other parts of Africa and places like Bangladesh, water supplies have been ruined and polluted by widespread flooding, which mixes various waste products with what used to be clean water.
The report also points to lack of basic national and regional level organisation in failing to provide widespread access to clean water.
in the worst affected countries such as Malawi there is neither government nor private ownership of water supplies. In such countries local communities are left to fend for themselves to sort out their own water, which may mean digging down into river beds and relying on muddy, contaminated water for drinking, unless they are lucky enough to work with NGOs which may help them sort out a bore hole.
Solutions
The report is keen to stress that IF we want to sort out clean water for 2 billion people by anytime near 2030 it is up to governments to work with the private sector to set up large scale infrastructure development and regulation to ensure that all people have access.
To my mind, this seems like a sensible priority: for a relatively small investment you are giving people access to what really is the most basic of human needs which can have knock on benefits for health, education, employment and gender equality.
is the cost of living crisis caused by a growing global middle class pushing up the price of scarce resources?
It’s possible that the current cost of living crisis in the UK is due to a long term trend of a growing middle class increasing demand for scarce natural resources, which pushes their prices up, further compounded by an increase in wages and thus cost of production as developing countries have become richer since the 1960s.
While this is clearly positive development, we in the UK have not invested sufficiently in the kind of technologies which could have helped us live more efficiently and thus protected us against the current short term shocks which have led to spikes in the cost of energy, raw materials and food.
The cost of living crises: a long term trend?
The UK government’s line on the cost of living crisis is that it’s driven by the post-pandemic squeeze on supply chains, and the war in Ukraine restricting the supply of raw materials, food and energy.
And the government can’t admit this but there’s a lot of objective data that suggests the current crisis has been made slightly worse by BREXIT making it more difficult for British Business to trade with Europe.
However I think there’s something more fundamental going on – in that even without the above three mega-events – we’d still be seeing an increase in the cost of living in the UK – all these events have done is rapidly accelerate a trend that was always inevitable given the trajectory of our high-consumption global development over the last several decades. (Moreover at least two of the above events are symptoms of that same economic trajectory).
The prices of energy, food, and the raw materials we need to keep our industries going, build our houses with and make the stuff we all want, are determined in a global economic system of demand and supply.
This is just basic economics – the more demand there is for goods, the more the prices of those goods increase, and the less supply there is of those goods, again, the more the prices increase.
A Growing Global Middle Class
Over the past several decades developing countries have become wealthier – in population terms the main drivers for this are China, India and also countries in South America – and we’ve seen a massive increase in the middle classes in those countries.
Research by PEW (1) has found that in 1975 the global middle class numbered 1 billion, by 2006 it numbered 2 billion and by 2015 there were 3 billion people in the global middle classes. 25% of these live in advanced economies and 40% live in the BRIC nations: Brazil, Russia, India and China, with the rest living in other countries.
Brookings (2) put the size of the global middle class at 3.8 BN in 2018, the point at which there were equal middle class and rich consumers relative to those classified as poor and vulnerable.
This is a huge success story for global development – with literally billions of people being lifted out of poverty and into relative affluence but this has also meant a huge increase in demand on the limited global resource base – on energy, food, and various raw materials.
We now have billions of more consumers demanding those resources that only a few decades ago a scant billion living mainly in affluent Europe and America could afford.
Just one indicator of this is the increase in demand for beef since the 1960s (3) – a very inefficient use of land per calories – but nonetheless something that consumers clearly want to eat more of as their incomes increase…
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, in the post-colonial era, it used to be the case that the raw materials we used to import, and increasingly the finished products (clothes, cars, and increasingly tech gadgets) we imported were cheap because of ‘our’ relative wealth and ‘their’ relative poverty – we benefited not only from being the only ones able to afford cars and consumer durables (low demand on raw materials = cheap resources) but also their cheap labour due to the relative differences in wealth between developed and less developed countries.
But now that many of those once poor countries aren’t so poor, we’ve got the double-whammy of more demand on those limited global resources and having to pay higher wages to the people in China (mainly China) who want to earn enough to buy the very same products they are making.
So I think what we are seeing now is basically just a more crowded marketplace, more demand for limited resources, more demand for higher wages, and thus higher prices for basic products.
Of course it’s not just the free market that determines these prices (there is no such thing as a purely free market) – the power of Nation States also comes into play – as they try to use policy-led coercion or brute force to secure cheap resources for their populations – according to David Harvey this is what the illegal U.S. War in Iraq was about – all about oil – and it’s probably what Putin’s war in Ukraine is about – Ukraine has lots of natural resources and it’s a bread-basket – as Putin sees it (probably) that is massive region full of natural resources that he wants to secure for Russia rather than those resources being sold (on the ‘free’ market to European countries.
And this also explains why ‘enlightened’ states in Europe and America are prepared to put up with human rights abuses in Qatar and Saudi-Arabia – they have huge oil reserves to put it bluntly and death sentences for gay people isn’t going to over ride the perceived importance of maintaining access to that of so precious resource – and oil of course isn’t only necessary to keep our cars on the road it’s also necessary to keep our military machines operating – so these unsavoury relationships are about maintaining both economic and military power.
Extraction of Profit from the U.K. over Investment?
Now to my mind we could, as a nation, have secured ourselves against this inevitable cost of living crisis driven ultimately by resource scarcity in the context of an increasingly wealthy global population, but we didn’t.
Instead we as consumers have squandered a decent portion of our wealth on consumer frivolities (holidays, throw away clothes, meals out etc. etc.), take on more debt than we needed to in order fund high-consumption lifestyles, and just generally been very wasteful.
Moreover, the global companies who have worked to bring us these products have extracted huge amounts of profit out of the country which is now sitting in tax havens, and, as a form of capital, is used by mainly the top 10% of global population, especially the top 1% to maintain their power and comfortable lifestyles, rather than being invested back into sustainable solutions for a sensible-consumption global future (more of that later).
A good example of how profit and capital has been used by the wealthy to benefit themselves rather than societies is the property boom in London – with billions of pounds being spent on investment properties to secure a nice lifestyle in a vibrant global city which has pushed the cost of housing up astronomically so that now even young professionals have to spend half their income just to rent a room in a shared house. And London isn’t the only city this has been happening in either.
Granted some of our wealth has gone to fund education, health and pensions, but these are creaking, and these could have been much better funded. (The average person in the UK is much better off in this regard than the average person in the U.S.)
So after several decades of (granted successful) development we’ve now got a super rich global elite who are sitting on piles of money, which is perversely contributing to rising prices itself (in the form of property price increases) and four decades of underinvestment in those technologies which could have if not averted the current cost of living crisis certainly helped to lessen its impact.
The Cost of Living Crises could Have been Avoided!
Just think what all of those trillions of extracted wealth could have done if invested in ultra-energy efficient infrastructure, local energy production (yes, sorry, solar and wind if combined with efficiency can go a LONG way to securing our energy needs!) and local sustainable food production – we’d be much more resilient to the kind of global market shocks we’ve seen since the Pandemic!
Final thoughts/ Disclaimers
NB this is just a working theory, but TLDR – we were always going to have a cost of living crisis in the U.K at some point!
P.S. also keep this in mind – the top 10% of people in the UK are in a much better position to weather this current cost of living crisis, the top 1% won’t even feel it at all!
P.P.S when thinking about policy solutions to the Cost of Living Crisis – remember this – the Tory party (especially Rishi Sunak whose wife is the daughter of the CEO of one of India’s largest tech companies) have a global perspective – gleaming extreme teeth-whitened smile aside, good old Rish is probably NOT thinking primarily about the well-being of the average British-bound person in the U.K. – he is more likely to be thinking about what’s good for him and his extensive network of global elite colleagues (the top 0.01% in his case).
From the perspective of the global elite, an increasing cost of living in the UK is not necessarily bad for them because they are globally mobile – they can base themselves in different countries to avoid the worst excesses of economic crises as they move around the globe, while the average UK citizen is ‘doomed to be local’ and suffer at the hands of Rishi’s piecemeal policies, which IMO are just about enough to give him a chance of being voted back into power in a few years, good old Rish!
Signposting and sources
This is an overdue personal rant relevant to the Global Development option, part of the A-level in Sociology specification
COP 27 – where 198 nations met to discuss climate change and agreed to do very little about it!
36 000 people representing 198 nations, companies, international organisations and civil society met in Egypt in November 2022 to try and agree further commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and slow down global warming, but little progress was made.
This post summarises the outcomes and applies some sociological concepts to this contemporary event.
What is COP 27?
Cop stands for ‘Conference of the Parties’ who meet to discuss actions to combat climate change under the United Nations Conference on Climate Change. In 2022 this was attended by representatives of 198 countries and several other representative from companies, international organisations and civil society groups.
2022 was the 27th international meeting on Climate Change since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, this year it was held in Egypt and was attended by 35 000 people.
Paris 2015
The 2015 COP meeting in Paris was especially signficant because this was the first time countries agreed to try and reduce global warming to within 1.5 degrees of pre-industrial levels by the year 2030.
Nationally Determined Contributions
Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs are fundamental to reducing global emissions and keeping the rate of global warming in check. They are specific country agreements which contain policy measures countries are prepared to implement to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Countries are supposed to publish these regularly, but only 24 had published revised NDCs since the previous COP meeting in Glasgow in 2021 and only 54 countries have long-term plans for reducing dependence on fossil fuels.
Main Outcomes of COP 27
The main outcomes of Cop 27 were:
The creation of a loss and damage fund to compensate developing countries for the disproportionate damage they have suffered from climate change caused primarily by developed countries which have been the main beneficiaries of the wealth generated by the industrial revolution. However there are no details of who is going to contribute, when, to what organisations or how much money is involved.
Countries failed to agree to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to hit the 1.5 degree increase by 2020 target, although in the last year a few countries have got more ambitious and so now we are on target to only increase out emissions by 10% rather than 13%.
Countries failed to commit to phasing out all fossil fuels, although they recommitted to phasing out the use of coal which had been introduced as part of Cop 26 in Glasgow.
There was a commitment to scale up the use of low emission energy, although gas might be redefined as low emission because it’s less toxic than goal and oil.
There was a recommitment by developed countries to provide $100 billion in funding to developing countries to help them adapt to climate change by funding projects such as sea defences and reforestation. However only $20 billion in funding has been provided since this was first agreed in 2021 and this year some countries tried to remove this commitment.
There are plans in place to restructure the World Bank so that it can provide funding to developing countries to help them adapt to climate change.
Copy 27 recognised that there might be ‘tipping point’s as the climate warms – once we get above a certain temperature things might get rapidly worse as climate change doesn’t happen in a smooth and linear fashion. They also recognised that climate change has a negative impact on people’s health which is a basic human right.
Criticisms of COP 27
Great Thunberg didn’t attend COP 27 because she accused the attendees of Greenwashing which is where governments use the international conference to make it appear like they are doing something about Climate Change but in reality they are not.
If you look back at the ‘achievements’ above you can clearly see that while these commitments are dressed up as ‘progress’ in reality very little has been achieved since Paris in 2015.
More radical climate activists such as Great Thunberg and organisations such as 350.0rg believe that we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels much ore rapidly and that it is possible to transition to fully renewable energy supplies such as solar and wind much sooner than 2030, but there just isn’t the political will to do so.
350.0rg’s demands.
Sociology applied to COP 27
COP 27 is an example of globalisation in action as this is one of the largest international meetings in history, attended by representatives of nearly every country on earth.
There is very little substance to any of the actions agreed upon at COP 27 and specific progress towards reducing our reliance on fossil fuels remains extremely limited. This suggests that if there is any kind of consensus at the level of national governments (or nation states) then that consensus is to do relatively little about getting global warming under control by 2030.
Nation States seem more committed on prioritising economic growth and poverty alleviation and setting up resilience funds to help poor countries deal with the negative effects of climate change, rather than a radical shift away from fossil fuels, suggesting support for the Marxist view that nation states are in alliance with the polluting fossil fuel companies.
There is a considerable portion of civil society (i.e. ordinary people) who think governments aren’t doing enough fast enough to combat global warming and climate change. For example Just Stop Oil have been active recently shutting down motorways, mainly representing the young rather than the old, and another organisation is 350.0rg who believe that a much faster transition to renewable energy is possible!
Anthony Giddens has said that Nation States are too small to deal with global problems – maybe we are seeing that here – while some nation states have committed to reducing emissions, most have not, and there’s not very much the committed states can do to force the others into following suit!
Signposting
The environment and development is one of the topics within the Global Development option on the AQA’s A-level sociology specification.
You’re more likely to live next to a waste incinerator in the UK if you’re black compared to if you’re white, and thus more likely to be breathing in toxic fumes.
The same trend is also true globally: ‘people of colour’ living in the global south are more likely to suffer environmental harms associated with climate changed compared to the majority white populations of the global north.
This report makes the very dramatic claim the current environmental crisis is based on a history of systemic racism rooted in Colonialism and in this post I summarise this report and suggest some limitations of it.
The Environmental Crisis is Built on Systemic Racism…
(Quite a claim!)
The report notes that it is mainly countries in the global south – mainly Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Africa – which have to bear the costs of global warming. It is these poorer countries which suffer economic setbacks because of increased sea level rises flooding land and destructive ‘extreme weather events’ such as cyclones. The report estimates that Mozambique, in Southern Africa suffered more than $3 Billion of environmental damages in 2019, for example.
Another dimension of ‘environmental racism’ is how the mainstream media under-reports man-made environmental humanitarian disasters in the global south compared to ‘white victories’ such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos space flight programmes….
And one further example lies in how Indigenous activists lives are put in danger.
Colonialism, Extractivism and Racism
The report also highlights three case studies of how colonial powers set up in developing countries (then simply their colonies) and systematically went about displacing indigenous peoples in order to extract resources for profit.
The three examples provided are Shell extracting Oil in Nigeria, and the displacement of the Ogoni people; the destruction of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and the establishment of meat and soy production and also the establishment of industrial scale fishing in Western Africa which has ruined local communities which used to rely on small scale fishing.
The report also covers the waste aspect of Environmental Racism – countries such as the UK tend to ship their toxic waste to poorer countries who often have lower pollution standards – so poor people end up recycling metal from plastic by burning the plastic for example….
Find out More…
There is more in the report such as how environmental racism works in the UK and how we can tackle climate change by simultaneously tackling racism in society, and I recommend you give it read: Confronting Injustice: Racism and the Environmental Emergency.
Relevance to A-Level Sociology
This contemporary report is clearly relevant to the Environment topic within the Global Development module, and you will also find lots of supporting case studies which support Dependency Theory.
In terms of social theory, this is a great contemporary example of ‘grand theorising’ – there’s nothing postmodern about this, and in fact reports leading to theorising such as this implicitly criticise the concept of postmodernity.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is having profound negative implications for not only Ukrainians but also the populations of every European country, and Russia itself.
This post explores some of the sociological concepts we might use to better understand the war and its consequences….
Students need to be able to apply contemporary events to their answers in their exams where ever possible, and this event is the most recent and ‘highest consequence’ event since the Pandemic, so it’s worth thinking about how you can make it relevant.
Global Development
This conflict is immediately relevant to the War and Conflict topic. It reminds us that conflicts do not only happen in the developing world and it’s also a grim reminder of the extreme social and economic consequences of war.
The war has disrupted the majority of Ukraine’s businesses meaning it’s economic output is well down, including its wheat production – which has implications for the cost of basic food stuffs in other countries as wheat is one of Ukraine’s major exports.
Also the damage done to infrastructure in Ukraine is going to mean billions of pounds of rebuilding after the war is over, hopefully sooner rather than later!
Crime and Deviance
Under United Nations conventions Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is illegal – one country isn’t supposed to invade another member country of the UN without the agreement of all the other nations, and Russia doesn’t have this consent in this case.
From a ‘human rights perspective’ this invasion is also a disaster – Russia is shelling civilian areas and killing children, and allegedly forcibly deporting prisoners of war back to Russia.
However the international community has been powerless to prevent this invasion, showing us that those Nation States with huge military power still have the capacity to do what they want.
European nations are generally in consensus about the immorality and illegality of the war, but that’s nominal (in name only) – but they aren’t prepared to go to war with Russia preferring ‘softer’ sanctions such as stopping buying Russian oil, but so far that is having limited affect.
The Family
The issue migration is relevant here. Consider the contrast between how the UK welcomed wealthy Russian Oligarchs since the collapse of the Soviet Union, without really asking any questions about how they accumulated their wealth or what links they may have had to an increasingly repressive regime under Putin. In sociological terms these are the ‘global elite’ – countries tend to try to attract these types of immigrant by offering favourable tax policies and turning a blind eye to any shady business and political connections they may have.
Contrast this to the difficulties so many Ukrainian refugees have faced trying to get into Britain despite the fact that there are people who have signed up to let them live in their houses. The Home Office seems to be deliberately delaying the issuing of visas – this is typical, countries tend not to welcome the poor and needy.
If you want an alternative point of view on the Taliban’s take over of Afghanistan, you should try following @janeygak on twitter.
She is pro-Taliban, anti-American, anti-liberal, and very active on twitter – constantly putting out tweets and re-tweets, such as this, stating that she doesn’t care about inclusivity or diversity in the Taliban government…..
I really don't care about whether the Taliban's cabinet is inclusive or diverse. The only people who give a shit about this stuff are dumb liberals.
What concerns me is whether Taliban can rule with justice and avoid nepotism and corruption.
NB – the account is semi-anonymous, I’m going with this article from CNN as confirmation that this is a woman rather than a man.
Either way, whatever the gender, it’s a great source to see the perspective of the other – most definitely NOT the mainstream American liberal view of what’s happening in Afghanistan at the moment.
NB – I don’t endorse any of her views, or those she retweets, this is strictly in the interests of giving some exposure to, a voice to someone actually inside Afghanistan, and it should help bust a few myths about how the ‘oppression of women’ works in Afghanistan.
This particular woman certainly isn’t oppressed.
NB – she’s also a bit fan of Bitcoin, in fact she provides a link to her Bitcoin wallet in her profile, and the reason she supports this cryptocurrency is because it’s a means whereby countries such as Afghanistan can break their dependence on US Aid and the US dollar more generally.
