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Comment by scythe | Hacker News Reader

>par?

What's par? Many countries in China's income quantile have environmental problems. China happens to be especially large, and India especially environmentalist, so they stick out like a billion sore thumbs.

Move just a little down the list and Indonesia and Brazil have both been all over the news for environmental destruction, while in Mexico, Pakistan and Nigeria, environmental issues are overshadowed by simmering civil wars.

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Well, if you want actual data, here's one (composite) metric.

China performs poorly, compared to par/GDP here, similarly to India. Brazil meanwhile ranks better.

https://epi.yale.edu/

That report places India behind the following countries in terms of political stability - Colombia, Bahrain, Tunisia, Burkina Faso, Togo. A country which got democracy 7 years ago is ranked higher than one that got it almost 60 years ago. That data point alone makes me question the rest of the report.

The age at which you got democracy isn't necessarily correlated with the quality of that democracy. Ask the US.

The metric is political stability, not quality of democracy. Are you saying that years of elections, smooth changes in leadership, free and fair elections as observed by international observers doesn't account for anything? That's the kind of reporting typically expected from folks who have no idea about the ground realities in developing countries. To contrast, the report has France at a high political stability score of 80 whereas it has had 5 prime ministers in 6 years. How is that politically stable?

Mind sharing links on India being especially environmentalist?

See here:

http://happyplanetindex.org/countries

India has a decent HPI. It's one of the few metrics that seems to avoid correlation with GDP without simply stratifying.

Brazil, Indonesia and other countries with similar levels of development are simply "late to the game" in regards to environmental destruction. Countries that developed sooner destroyed their own environments before there was scrutiny.

If western countries want to stop developing countries from using their own resources, some financial compensation should be involved.

How about sanctions + aircraft carrier? It works for almost all developing countries.

The early US and other economies were built on slave labor. Should we compensate Brazil, Indonesia and other countries if we don't want them to use slave labor?

In fairness, Brazil had plenty of slavery for a long time.

I object to this slavery analogy entirely. I do not believe it is appropriate.

Those countries also have the benefit of 100 odd years of technological improvements. It’s not unreasonable to expect they take advantage of that.

What simmering civil war in Pakistan?

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