Globalization
Globalization and its Impact on the Environment
Global change has become a popular word in scientific debates on long-range structural change in the earth’s ecology. Globalization has in the past played a major role in the controversial environmental debates. Many problems resulted in this area of discussion, in regard to the intricate linkages between globalization, government, trade and transport, and environmental decay. The current debate on globalization and its impact on the environment has three major disciplines; Economics, Political Science and Biology. It is particularly concerned with the question whether a worldwide liberalization of trade may provoke environmental collapse. Three major environmental concerns related to trade are the domestic environmental effects caused by the use of imported products, the foreign environmental effects caused by the production of exported goods, and the environmental effects caused by transport movements needed for international trade.
In a democratic society, the citizens presume the right to make laws that reflect their deepest values, yet this is no longer the case. With the emergence of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which is the only global international organization that deals with the rules of trade between nations, democracy has been abandoned. It no longer matters what the democratic societies want, but what the global corporations want. Created in 1994, the WTO is already among the most powerful, reserved, undemocratic bodies on earth (D. Robertson, 2002). It has been granted with vast powers, which include the right to judge whether laws of nations are impairments to trade, by WTO standards. They rule laws concerning public health, food safety, small business, labor standards, culture, human rights, and other social and economic procedures (Khi Thai, 2007). If any of these laws proved to be harming to trade, the World Trade Organization can demand their nullification, or enforce very...
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