Group Mason Kirkpatrick & Rose Mayer Background The transition from the Anthropocene to the Capitalocene proposes the idea of leaving the age of man in favor of the age of capital. The global superpowers exhibit late stage capitalist tendencies and the Capitalocene implies that humans themselves are no longer the major players in the health of the global environment. Rather it is the specter of capitalism that has the most influence. While measuring the Capitalocene can provide rather useful information, it also provides some challenges. First, countries that aren’t capitalist or don’t display capitalist tendencies are measured in the same manner as late stage capitalist countries. Additionally, the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) is used to quantifiably measure the performance of a government's environmental policies. This allows wealthier countries to have a greater EPI because they can afford more environmental policies than developing nations. Procedure The first thing that we needed to do for this lab was to merge all of our data onto one sheet which we did by downloading an add on. We made sure that all the data lined up correctly based on region and income group. Once our data was lined up properly we were tasked with calculating the mean and standard deviation for the three main EPI indicators for which we used a pivot table. From there we were able to graph the mean and standard deviation of the EPI indicators by the World Bank income groups and regions. From there we were able to analyze our results. Results
As it has become abundantly clear, as you increase the level of income of the country and region the Environmental Performance of that area increases as well. When looking at the region, areas with a greater environmental performance are classically viewed as wealthier areas were other regions with lesser environmental performance are viewed as less wealthy. The most significant result is viewing the relationship of the wealth of a country or region with its respective environmental performance and seeing that wealth directly correlates with environmental performance. Discussion The larger implications of what we discovered is that if any global measures were put in place to incentivize nations or regions to increase their environmental performance, then it would heavily favor wealthier nations. This would act counter intuitively to the purpose of raising the global environmental performance because wealthier nations would advance further ahead while less wealthy nations would keep falling behind. Additionally, countries with lower environmental performances are focusing on more specific issues like drinking water and general health and wellbeing of its citizens rather than their global impact on the environment.
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AuthorMason Kirkpatrick. Class of 2021 Archives
November 2018
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