Photo: Marko Djurica --The sun sets over Kabul January 31, 2010.

Iceland Tops Environment List.  U.S., China, and India Lag Far Behind

According to a new report and world-wide ranking of 163 nations based on environmental public health and the vitality of their ecosystems, Iceland, Switzerland, Costa Rica, Sweden, and Norway are in the top five, with the U.S. trailing in 61st place and China and India ranking 121st and 123rd respectively. The Environmental Performance Index, compiled by researchers at Yale and Columbia universities, ranks countries based on 10 main categories such as environmental health, air quality, water management, biodiversity and habitat, forestry, and climate change.

During his Q&A with Republicans last Friday, President Obama said:

“. . . . we have to plan for the future.  And the future is that clean energy — cleaner forms of energy are going to be increasingly important, because even if folks are still skeptical in some cases about climate change in our politics and in Congress, the world is not skeptical about it.  If we’re going to be after some of these big markets, they’re going to be looking to see, is the United States the one that’s developing clean coal technology?  Is the United States developing our natural gas resources in the most effective way?  Is the United States the one that is going to lead in electric cars?  Because if we’re not leading, those other countries are going to be leading.

So what I want to do is work with West Virginia to figure out how we can seize that future.  [changing coal instead of getting rid of it]  But to do that, that means there’s going to have to be some transition.. . . “

That was an excellent point:  even if there are climate change skeptics in the U.S. who don’t want to act until they are “sure” about climate change, the rest of the world is already sure and acting on it. That means the U.S. is falling behind.  Other countries are getting to work on green energy and green jobs and cutting emissions now, and if we don’t join in we are going to be left in the dust and lose that business in the new greener technology.  It’s already happening.  If we don’t start catching up to other countries in new tech and cutting emissions now we’ll be even farther down the list next year.

More from the report:

Iceland ranked at the top because of its excellent environmental public health and reliance on renewable sources of energy such as geothermal and hydropower. Although the U.S. placed high in categories such as safe drinking water and forest sustainability, it ranked 61st overall because of its massive greenhouse gas emissions and local air pollution problems. The low rankings of India and China are due to the severe environmental strain brought about by overpopulation and rapid economic growth. The bottom five countries were Togo, Angola, Mauritania, the Central African Republic, and Sierra Leone, all impoverished nations [...]