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brdgtFindings: A Shocker: Partisan Thought Is Unconscious
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, January 24, 2006
Liberals and conservatives can become equally bug-eyed and irrational when talking politics, especially when they are on the defensive.
Using M.R.I. scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the politically partisan brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates or criticisms of them. The process is almost entirely emotional and unconscious, the researchers report, and there are flares of activity in the brain's pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected.
"Everything we know about cognition suggests that, when faced with a contradiction, we use the rational regions of our brain to think about it, but that was not the case here," said Dr. Drew Westen, a psychologist at Emory and lead author of the study, to be presented Saturday at meetings of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in Palm Springs, Calif.
The results are the latest from brain imaging studies that provide a neural explanation for internal states, like infatuation or ambivalence, and a graphic trace of the brain's activity.
In 2004, the researchers recruited 30 adult men who described themselves as committed Republicans or Democrats. The men, half of them supporters of President Bush and the other half backers of Senator John Kerry, earned $50 to sit in an M.R.I. machine and consider several statements in quick succession.
The first was a quote attributed to one of the two candidates: either a remark by Mr. Bush in support of Kenneth L. Lay, the former Enron chief, before he was indicted, or a statement by Mr. Kerry that Social Security should be overhauled. Moments later, the participants read a remark that showed the candidate reversing his position. The quotes were doctored for maximum effect but presented as factual.
The Republicans in the study judged Mr. Kerry as harshly as the Democrats judged Mr. Bush. But each group let its own candidate off the hook.
After the participants read the contradictory comment, the researchers measured increased activity in several areas of the brain. They included a region involved in regulating negative emotions and another called the cingulate, which activates when the brain makes judgments about forgiveness, among other things. Also, a spike appeared in several areas known to be active when people feel relieved or rewarded. The "cold reasoning" regions of the cortex were relatively quiet.
Researchers have long known that political decisions are strongly influenced by unconscious emotional reactions, a fact routinely exploited by campaign consultants and advertisers. But the new research suggests that for partisans, political thinking is often predominantly emotional.
It is possible to override these biases, Dr. Westen said, "but you have to engage in ruthless self reflection, to say, 'All right, I know what I want to believe, but I have to be honest.' "
He added, "It speaks to the character of the discourse that this quality is rarely talked about in politics."
Mastering the Geometry of the Jungle
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR, The New York Times, January 24, 2006
An indigenous group called the Mundurukú, who live in isolated villages in several Brazilian states in the Amazon jungles, have no words in their language for square, rectangle, triangle or any other geometric shape except circles.
The members use no measuring instruments or compasses, they have no maps, and their words for directions are limited to sunrise, sunset, upstream and downstream. The Mundurukú language has few words for numbers beyond five except "few" and "many," and even those words are not used consistently.
Yet, researchers have discovered, they appear to understand many principles of geometry as well as American children do, and in some cases almost as well as American adults. An article describing the findings appears in the Jan. 20 issue of Science.
"Across cultures that live extremely different lives, we see common foundational sets of abilities," said Elizabeth Spelke, a co-author of the paper and a professor of psychology at Harvard, "and they are not just low-level kinds of abilities that humans share with other animals, but abilities that are at the center of human thinking at its highest reaches."
To test their understanding of geometry, the researchers presented 44 members of a Mundurukú group and 54 Americans with a series of slides illustrating various geometric concepts. Each slide had six images. Five of them were examples of the concept; one was not.
The Mundurukú subjects, tested by a native speaker of Mundurukú working with a linguist, were asked to identify the image that was "weird" or "ugly." For example, to test the concept of right angles, a slide shows five right triangles and one isosceles triangle. The isosceles triangle is the correct answer.
In data that do not appear in the article but were presented by e-mail from the authors, Mundurukú children scored the same as American children - 64 percent right - while Mundurukú adults scored 83 percent compared with 86 percent for the American adults.
The researchers also tested the Mundurukú with maps, demonstrating that people who had never seen a map before could use one correctly to orient themselves in space and to locate objects previously hidden in containers laid out on the ground.
The indigenous people were able to use the maps to find the objects, even when they were presented with the maps at varying angles so that they had to turn them mentally to match the pattern on the ground in front of them. Dr. Spelke found this particularly significant.
"The Mundurukú, who aren't themselves in a culture that relies on symbols of any kind, when they were presented with maps were able to spontaneously extract the geometric information in them," she said.
The idea that an understanding of geometry may be a universal quality of the human mind dates back at least as far as Plato. In the Meno dialogue by Plato, written about 380 B.C., he describes Socrates as he elicited correct answers to geometric puzzles from a young slave who had never studied the subject.
Do these findings among the Mundurukú confirm Socrates' contention that concepts of geometry are innate? Stanislas Dehaene, another co-author and a professor of psychology at the College of France, is not willing to go quite that far. People learn things, after all, just by living in the world.
"In our article we do not use the word 'innate,' " he said in an e-mail message. "We do not know whether this core knowledge is present very early on - the youngest subjects we tested were 5 years old - or to what extent it is learned. The Mundurukú, like all of us, do interact with 3-D objects, navigate in a complex spatial environment, and so on."
Instead, Dr. Dehaene described an innate ability, rather than an innate knowledge. "Our current thinking is that the human brain has been predisposed by millions of years of evolution to 'internalize,' either very early on or through very fast learning, various mental representations of the external world, including representations of space, time and number," he explained.
"I have proposed that such representations provide a universal foundation for the cultural constructions of mathematics," he added.
Dr. Spelke sees in these results evidence of the universality of human thought processes. "Geometry is central to the development of science and the arts," she said. "The profile of abilities that the Mundurukú show is qualitatively very similar to what we see in our own culture. This suggests that we are finding some of the common ground at the center of human knowledge."
Vital Signs: Senses: Bad News for Nerves of Aging Fans of Heavy Metal
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR, The New York Times, January 24, 2006
Longtime exposure to loud noise may increase the risk of developing a benign nerve tumor called an acoustic neuroma, Swedish research suggests.
The tumor, which grows inside the skull, can cause constant ringing in the ears, affect balance and result in deafness. It occurs mainly in people over 50.
The findings, published online in The American Journal of Epidemiology, will appear in the Feb. 15 print edition.
The researchers studied a population of 3.9 million people covered by Swedish tumor registries and interviewed 146 people with acoustic neuromas. They were compared with a randomly selected control group of 564 people who did not have the tumors. The participants discussed their lifetime exposure to noise exceeding 80 decibels, about the noise level of city traffic.
In general, the longer people were exposed to loud noises the more likely they were to develop acoustic neuroma.
Compared with those exposed to little noise, people steadily facing construction noise were 1.7 times as likely to have a tumor, and those exposed to screaming children, sports events and noise in restaurants and bars were 1.4 times as likely to be affected.
But exposure to loud music presented the greatest risk. People who regularly listened to loud music, including those in the music industry, were more than twice as likely as others to have the tumors.
Colin G. Edwards, a doctoral student at Ohio State University and the lead author of the paper on the findings, pointed out that the data depend on the participants' own reports and that people with tumors may, in an effort to find a cause for the problem, make errors in recollections of past activities.
"Our study," he concluded, "is not proof that loud noise causes acoustic neuroma, but it suggests a possible link. The results need to be confirmed in other studies."
United States Ranks 28th on Environment, a New Study Says
By FELICITY BARRINGER, The New York Times, January 23, 2006
WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 - A pilot nation-by-nation study of environmental performance shows that just six nations - led by New Zealand, followed by five from Northern Europe - have achieved 85 percent or better success in meeting a set of critical environmental goals ranging from clean drinking water and low ozone levels to sustainable fisheries and low greenhouse gas emissions.
The study, jointly produced by Yale and Columbia Universities, ranked the United States 28th over all, behind most of Western Europe, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, Costa Rica and Chile, but ahead of Russia and South Korea.
The bottom half of the rankings is largely filled with the countries of Africa and Central and South Asia. Pakistan and India both rank among the 20 lowest-scoring countries, with overall success rates of 41.1 percent and 47.7 percent, respectively.
The pilot study, called the 2006 Environmental Performance Index, has been reviewed by specialists both in the United States and internationally.
Using a new variant of the methodology the two universities have applied in their Environmental Sustainability Index, produced in four previous years, the study was intended to focus more attention on how various governments have played the environmental hands they have been dealt, said Daniel C. Esty, the director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and an author of the report.
The earlier sustainability measurements "tell you something about long-term trajectories," Mr. Esty said. "We think this tool has a much greater application in the policy context."
For instance, Britain ranked 65th in last year's sustainability index, but 5th in the latest study, among the 133 nations measured. Among the reasons for the earlier low ranking, Mr. Esty said, was that "they cut down almost all their trees 500 years ago and before," something that modern British governments could not control.
The 16 indicators used in the latest study, the report says, provide "a powerful tool for evaluating environmental investments and improving policy results."
The report will be issued during the World Economic Forum, an annual conclave of business and political leaders which meets in Davos, Switzerland, this week. Mr. Esty said the report was also intended as a tool to help monitor progress on the environmental issues included among the Millennium Development goals adopted by 189 nations at the United Nations Millennium Summit.
"It's like holding up a mirror and having someone help you see what you couldn't see before," he said. But the report acknowledges "serious data gaps" that resulted in leaving more than 65 countries out of the rankings. In addition, some thorny methodological issues, like how to measure land degradation or loss of wetlands, have no widely accepted solutions, the report noted, and the authors used the best measures they had available.
Like the sustainability index produced last year, the pilot study ranks countries within their geographic peer groups, so that nations in arid regions or tropical ones can be measured against one another. So Belgium's overall ranking of 39, with a 75.9 percent score, can be viewed by region and by issue. Belgium ranks last, for instance, among European countries in protection of its water resources.
Air quality rankings tend to favor less industrialized nations like Uganda, Gabon, Ecuador and Sri Lanka. Among the countries of the Americas, the United States ranks in the bottom third on this scale.
In the Americas, the United States is at the bottom of the scale measuring agricultural, forest and fisheries management, in part because the study is weighted against countries with a high level of crop subsidies. The study's authors say that such subsidies "in agriculture, fisheries and energy sectors have been shown to have negative impacts on resource use and management practices."
In the area of environmental health, the study measured such factors as sanitation, lead exposure and indoor air pollution, a particular concern in the least developed countries, where indoor home fires may be common. In those measures, the richest countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, France, Britain, Ireland and the countries of Northern and Central Europe score near 100 percent.
On the same scale, the poorest countries fared worst, with 32 of 37 sub-Saharan African nations, along with Bangladesh, Haiti, Yemen, Tajikistan, Laos, Cambodia and Papua New Guinea, scoring at or below 40 percent. Chad and Niger rank last in the world, with scores of 0 percent and 1 percent, respectively.
"In the zone we capture as the field of play, they're at the very bottom," Mr. Esty said. "It doesn't mean that nobody there has a toilet. It means a very, very small percent do."
The energy sustainability portion of the index factors national wealth into measurements of energy efficiency and greenhouse-gas emissions. Nonetheless, all but three of the top 25 spots in the worldwide rankings are occupied by countries in economic distress, including Uganda, Chad and Myanmar. Switzerland, Costa Rica and Peru are the exceptions.
The study's definition of renewable energy resources does not include nuclear power - in part, Mr. Esty said, because countries with a high proportion of nuclear-fueled energy, like Japan, the Czech Republic and France, reaped the benefits of their energy choices by earning high rankings on the study's other scales, like the air quality index measuring particulate matter.
To create another scale that disproportionately favored nuclear-energy users would have undermined the overall reliability of the study, he said. As a result, the renewable-energy rankings tilt heavily toward countries reliant on hydropower, like tiny Bhutan.
The study shows that annual carbon dioxide emissions, measured as metric tons per $1 million of gross domestic product, average about 363 tons. North Korea, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Mongolia rank at the bottom of the scale, with amounts ranging from Mongolia's 1,992 tons to North Korea's 4,859 tons.
Carbon dioxide emissions from nations with rapid economic expansion, like China and India, are more than double the world average (731 tons and 621 tons, respectively). The United States, at 171 tons per $1 million of gross domestic product, ranks well behind some other nations in the Group of 8, the major industrial powers - France (56), Japan (57), Germany (80) and Britain (118) - but close to Canada (168), ahead of Australia (209) and far ahead of Russia (914).
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, January 24, 2006
Liberals and conservatives can become equally bug-eyed and irrational when talking politics, especially when they are on the defensive.
Using M.R.I. scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the politically partisan brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates or criticisms of them. The process is almost entirely emotional and unconscious, the researchers report, and there are flares of activity in the brain's pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected.
"Everything we know about cognition suggests that, when faced with a contradiction, we use the rational regions of our brain to think about it, but that was not the case here," said Dr. Drew Westen, a psychologist at Emory and lead author of the study, to be presented Saturday at meetings of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in Palm Springs, Calif.
The results are the latest from brain imaging studies that provide a neural explanation for internal states, like infatuation or ambivalence, and a graphic trace of the brain's activity.
In 2004, the researchers recruited 30 adult men who described themselves as committed Republicans or Democrats. The men, half of them supporters of President Bush and the other half backers of Senator John Kerry, earned $50 to sit in an M.R.I. machine and consider several statements in quick succession.
The first was a quote attributed to one of the two candidates: either a remark by Mr. Bush in support of Kenneth L. Lay, the former Enron chief, before he was indicted, or a statement by Mr. Kerry that Social Security should be overhauled. Moments later, the participants read a remark that showed the candidate reversing his position. The quotes were doctored for maximum effect but presented as factual.
The Republicans in the study judged Mr. Kerry as harshly as the Democrats judged Mr. Bush. But each group let its own candidate off the hook.
After the participants read the contradictory comment, the researchers measured increased activity in several areas of the brain. They included a region involved in regulating negative emotions and another called the cingulate, which activates when the brain makes judgments about forgiveness, among other things. Also, a spike appeared in several areas known to be active when people feel relieved or rewarded. The "cold reasoning" regions of the cortex were relatively quiet.
Researchers have long known that political decisions are strongly influenced by unconscious emotional reactions, a fact routinely exploited by campaign consultants and advertisers. But the new research suggests that for partisans, political thinking is often predominantly emotional.
It is possible to override these biases, Dr. Westen said, "but you have to engage in ruthless self reflection, to say, 'All right, I know what I want to believe, but I have to be honest.' "
He added, "It speaks to the character of the discourse that this quality is rarely talked about in politics."
Mastering the Geometry of the Jungle
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR, The New York Times, January 24, 2006
An indigenous group called the Mundurukú, who live in isolated villages in several Brazilian states in the Amazon jungles, have no words in their language for square, rectangle, triangle or any other geometric shape except circles.
The members use no measuring instruments or compasses, they have no maps, and their words for directions are limited to sunrise, sunset, upstream and downstream. The Mundurukú language has few words for numbers beyond five except "few" and "many," and even those words are not used consistently.
Yet, researchers have discovered, they appear to understand many principles of geometry as well as American children do, and in some cases almost as well as American adults. An article describing the findings appears in the Jan. 20 issue of Science.
"Across cultures that live extremely different lives, we see common foundational sets of abilities," said Elizabeth Spelke, a co-author of the paper and a professor of psychology at Harvard, "and they are not just low-level kinds of abilities that humans share with other animals, but abilities that are at the center of human thinking at its highest reaches."
To test their understanding of geometry, the researchers presented 44 members of a Mundurukú group and 54 Americans with a series of slides illustrating various geometric concepts. Each slide had six images. Five of them were examples of the concept; one was not.
The Mundurukú subjects, tested by a native speaker of Mundurukú working with a linguist, were asked to identify the image that was "weird" or "ugly." For example, to test the concept of right angles, a slide shows five right triangles and one isosceles triangle. The isosceles triangle is the correct answer.
In data that do not appear in the article but were presented by e-mail from the authors, Mundurukú children scored the same as American children - 64 percent right - while Mundurukú adults scored 83 percent compared with 86 percent for the American adults.
The researchers also tested the Mundurukú with maps, demonstrating that people who had never seen a map before could use one correctly to orient themselves in space and to locate objects previously hidden in containers laid out on the ground.
The indigenous people were able to use the maps to find the objects, even when they were presented with the maps at varying angles so that they had to turn them mentally to match the pattern on the ground in front of them. Dr. Spelke found this particularly significant.
"The Mundurukú, who aren't themselves in a culture that relies on symbols of any kind, when they were presented with maps were able to spontaneously extract the geometric information in them," she said.
The idea that an understanding of geometry may be a universal quality of the human mind dates back at least as far as Plato. In the Meno dialogue by Plato, written about 380 B.C., he describes Socrates as he elicited correct answers to geometric puzzles from a young slave who had never studied the subject.
Do these findings among the Mundurukú confirm Socrates' contention that concepts of geometry are innate? Stanislas Dehaene, another co-author and a professor of psychology at the College of France, is not willing to go quite that far. People learn things, after all, just by living in the world.
"In our article we do not use the word 'innate,' " he said in an e-mail message. "We do not know whether this core knowledge is present very early on - the youngest subjects we tested were 5 years old - or to what extent it is learned. The Mundurukú, like all of us, do interact with 3-D objects, navigate in a complex spatial environment, and so on."
Instead, Dr. Dehaene described an innate ability, rather than an innate knowledge. "Our current thinking is that the human brain has been predisposed by millions of years of evolution to 'internalize,' either very early on or through very fast learning, various mental representations of the external world, including representations of space, time and number," he explained.
"I have proposed that such representations provide a universal foundation for the cultural constructions of mathematics," he added.
Dr. Spelke sees in these results evidence of the universality of human thought processes. "Geometry is central to the development of science and the arts," she said. "The profile of abilities that the Mundurukú show is qualitatively very similar to what we see in our own culture. This suggests that we are finding some of the common ground at the center of human knowledge."
Vital Signs: Senses: Bad News for Nerves of Aging Fans of Heavy Metal
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR, The New York Times, January 24, 2006
Longtime exposure to loud noise may increase the risk of developing a benign nerve tumor called an acoustic neuroma, Swedish research suggests.
The tumor, which grows inside the skull, can cause constant ringing in the ears, affect balance and result in deafness. It occurs mainly in people over 50.
The findings, published online in The American Journal of Epidemiology, will appear in the Feb. 15 print edition.
The researchers studied a population of 3.9 million people covered by Swedish tumor registries and interviewed 146 people with acoustic neuromas. They were compared with a randomly selected control group of 564 people who did not have the tumors. The participants discussed their lifetime exposure to noise exceeding 80 decibels, about the noise level of city traffic.
In general, the longer people were exposed to loud noises the more likely they were to develop acoustic neuroma.
Compared with those exposed to little noise, people steadily facing construction noise were 1.7 times as likely to have a tumor, and those exposed to screaming children, sports events and noise in restaurants and bars were 1.4 times as likely to be affected.
But exposure to loud music presented the greatest risk. People who regularly listened to loud music, including those in the music industry, were more than twice as likely as others to have the tumors.
Colin G. Edwards, a doctoral student at Ohio State University and the lead author of the paper on the findings, pointed out that the data depend on the participants' own reports and that people with tumors may, in an effort to find a cause for the problem, make errors in recollections of past activities.
"Our study," he concluded, "is not proof that loud noise causes acoustic neuroma, but it suggests a possible link. The results need to be confirmed in other studies."
United States Ranks 28th on Environment, a New Study Says
By FELICITY BARRINGER, The New York Times, January 23, 2006
WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 - A pilot nation-by-nation study of environmental performance shows that just six nations - led by New Zealand, followed by five from Northern Europe - have achieved 85 percent or better success in meeting a set of critical environmental goals ranging from clean drinking water and low ozone levels to sustainable fisheries and low greenhouse gas emissions.
The study, jointly produced by Yale and Columbia Universities, ranked the United States 28th over all, behind most of Western Europe, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, Costa Rica and Chile, but ahead of Russia and South Korea.
The bottom half of the rankings is largely filled with the countries of Africa and Central and South Asia. Pakistan and India both rank among the 20 lowest-scoring countries, with overall success rates of 41.1 percent and 47.7 percent, respectively.
The pilot study, called the 2006 Environmental Performance Index, has been reviewed by specialists both in the United States and internationally.
Using a new variant of the methodology the two universities have applied in their Environmental Sustainability Index, produced in four previous years, the study was intended to focus more attention on how various governments have played the environmental hands they have been dealt, said Daniel C. Esty, the director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and an author of the report.
The earlier sustainability measurements "tell you something about long-term trajectories," Mr. Esty said. "We think this tool has a much greater application in the policy context."
For instance, Britain ranked 65th in last year's sustainability index, but 5th in the latest study, among the 133 nations measured. Among the reasons for the earlier low ranking, Mr. Esty said, was that "they cut down almost all their trees 500 years ago and before," something that modern British governments could not control.
The 16 indicators used in the latest study, the report says, provide "a powerful tool for evaluating environmental investments and improving policy results."
The report will be issued during the World Economic Forum, an annual conclave of business and political leaders which meets in Davos, Switzerland, this week. Mr. Esty said the report was also intended as a tool to help monitor progress on the environmental issues included among the Millennium Development goals adopted by 189 nations at the United Nations Millennium Summit.
"It's like holding up a mirror and having someone help you see what you couldn't see before," he said. But the report acknowledges "serious data gaps" that resulted in leaving more than 65 countries out of the rankings. In addition, some thorny methodological issues, like how to measure land degradation or loss of wetlands, have no widely accepted solutions, the report noted, and the authors used the best measures they had available.
Like the sustainability index produced last year, the pilot study ranks countries within their geographic peer groups, so that nations in arid regions or tropical ones can be measured against one another. So Belgium's overall ranking of 39, with a 75.9 percent score, can be viewed by region and by issue. Belgium ranks last, for instance, among European countries in protection of its water resources.
Air quality rankings tend to favor less industrialized nations like Uganda, Gabon, Ecuador and Sri Lanka. Among the countries of the Americas, the United States ranks in the bottom third on this scale.
In the Americas, the United States is at the bottom of the scale measuring agricultural, forest and fisheries management, in part because the study is weighted against countries with a high level of crop subsidies. The study's authors say that such subsidies "in agriculture, fisheries and energy sectors have been shown to have negative impacts on resource use and management practices."
In the area of environmental health, the study measured such factors as sanitation, lead exposure and indoor air pollution, a particular concern in the least developed countries, where indoor home fires may be common. In those measures, the richest countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, France, Britain, Ireland and the countries of Northern and Central Europe score near 100 percent.
On the same scale, the poorest countries fared worst, with 32 of 37 sub-Saharan African nations, along with Bangladesh, Haiti, Yemen, Tajikistan, Laos, Cambodia and Papua New Guinea, scoring at or below 40 percent. Chad and Niger rank last in the world, with scores of 0 percent and 1 percent, respectively.
"In the zone we capture as the field of play, they're at the very bottom," Mr. Esty said. "It doesn't mean that nobody there has a toilet. It means a very, very small percent do."
The energy sustainability portion of the index factors national wealth into measurements of energy efficiency and greenhouse-gas emissions. Nonetheless, all but three of the top 25 spots in the worldwide rankings are occupied by countries in economic distress, including Uganda, Chad and Myanmar. Switzerland, Costa Rica and Peru are the exceptions.
The study's definition of renewable energy resources does not include nuclear power - in part, Mr. Esty said, because countries with a high proportion of nuclear-fueled energy, like Japan, the Czech Republic and France, reaped the benefits of their energy choices by earning high rankings on the study's other scales, like the air quality index measuring particulate matter.
To create another scale that disproportionately favored nuclear-energy users would have undermined the overall reliability of the study, he said. As a result, the renewable-energy rankings tilt heavily toward countries reliant on hydropower, like tiny Bhutan.
The study shows that annual carbon dioxide emissions, measured as metric tons per $1 million of gross domestic product, average about 363 tons. North Korea, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Mongolia rank at the bottom of the scale, with amounts ranging from Mongolia's 1,992 tons to North Korea's 4,859 tons.
Carbon dioxide emissions from nations with rapid economic expansion, like China and India, are more than double the world average (731 tons and 621 tons, respectively). The United States, at 171 tons per $1 million of gross domestic product, ranks well behind some other nations in the Group of 8, the major industrial powers - France (56), Japan (57), Germany (80) and Britain (118) - but close to Canada (168), ahead of Australia (209) and far ahead of Russia (914).
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-24 07:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-24 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-24 08:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-24 08:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-24 08:30 pm (UTC)And thank you! :)
no subject
Date: 2006-01-24 08:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-24 08:35 pm (UTC)And to those nay-sayers, I say: If you don't want to read it, go somewhere else!