American Work Ethics and Global Warming

So, I guess it’s my turn to say something about the most popular debate of our modern times, Global Warming. I’ll try to express my thoughts with respect to the study the link to which you’ll find below.

The thesis of the Washington-based Center for Economic Policy Research has an interesting point of view on the issue. The title is “Are Shorter Work Hours Good for the Environment? A Comparison of U.S. and European Energy Consumption” and starts with pointing out that as the U.S. is the biggest source of the Global Warming itself (25%) (Report does not directly mention this though) Americans work way much more than the Norwegians or the Dutch when compared on average work hours per year.

The report says that, “If the Americans were to have embraced European working standards in the year 2000, the reduction in energy consumption would have yielded a 7 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions”. That would have been enough for Unites States to apply the Kyoto protocol. (Kyoto, have also been disregarded by my home country Turkey)

From the other side of view, the report argues that if the world’s biggest 23 countries were to apply “American work ethics”, that would lead to a massive increase in the energy consumption (between plus 17 and 27 percent) which means a little bit of a catastrophe for the man kind. (That would trigger a new war maybe, who knows?) And with an increasing labor trend, the most positive scenario includes a 2.5 degree Centigrade jump in average temperatures around the globe.

So it’s obvious here that, longer work hours mean more energy use which leads to global warming. That’s the core of the exploration by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

And finally, in a nut shell, the ethics part of this debate is this: It’s obvious that the American work “ethics” does not do the trick by overloading its labor force for the sake of more production, while that also leads to a huge amount of energy consumption which is the main reason for the increased atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. (e.g. Carbon Dioxide)

This is, obviously not appropriate on neither corporate nor national governance grounds. (Major failure on corporate social responsibility) (There is also the moral -personally- side of the issue, which we all have to think on ourselves. It is nothing to do with labor work hours or such; just about personal decisions on using fossil fuels for residential heating, or using aerosol spray cans ext.)

Relative Links:
The paper from the Center's web-site.

P.S.: I kind of feel rusty after a long break without any posts. Hope that, I’ll be recovering in the following weeks.