We are looking for 
Published: September 1st, 2008
The photo shows Beijing Olympic Games banners in China. Photo: Cmaccubbin.
Billions of us have seen the performances of the marvellous athletes at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. The top 15 countries in terms of 5 or more Gold medals were the host nation China (#1, 51 Gold medals), the US (#2, 36), Russia (#3, 23), the UK (#4; 19; the next Olympic host nation), Germany (#5, 16), Australia (#6, 14), South Korea (#7, 13), Japan (#8, 9), Italy (#9, 8), France (#10, 7), Ukraine (#11, 7), the Netherlands (#12, 7), Jamaica (#13, 6), Spain (#14, 5) and Kenya (#15, 5).
However we must ask the question: how GREEN were the efforts of the successful Gold Medal-winning countries?
Clearly winning Gold is not vital for human survival – it can be seen in today’s starving world as a national pride indulgence and involved significant national investment (apparently up to $100 million dollars for each Gold Medal won by Australia). Winning Gold was clearly expensive in terms of dollars and hence in terms of greenhouse gas pollution in a global carbon-based energy system. However it is a major research project to determine the precise investment in Gold Medals for every country.
One initial approach to “How Green were the Gold Medal Winners?” is to determine the Olympic Gold Medal Tally per capita. In terms of “Gold Medals won per million of population” Jamaica (2.222) was #1 followed by Bahrain (#2, 1.326), Estonia (#3, 0.775), New Zealand (#4, 0.763), Mongolia (#5, 0.749) and Australia (#7, 0.697). India (0.00091) came last (for a very detailed and documented analyses see “Beijing Olympic Gold Talley per head of population”).
India’s last position should be a matter of some pride to Indians because it is indicative of a humanity that says that huge investment in sport for Gold medals is an unconscionable indulgence in a world in which 16 million people die avoidably each year from deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease (see “Global avoidable mortality”). This interpretation of the Beijing Olympics Gold Medal Tally is provided in an article “India TOPS humanity-indicative Olympics Population/Gold Medals list of Gold medal-winning nations”.
However, a further key part of our “Green-ness” analysis should take per capita greenhouse gas pollution into account. A better relative measure of how “greenhouse gas dirty” each national Olympic Gold Medal tally is would be to multiply the “Gold medals per million of population” by the “annual per capita greenhouse gas pollution” to get a an Olympic Gold Medal Extravagance Index (Profligacy Index or Excess Index).
Thus, for example, in terms of (A) “2008 Gold Medals per million of 2005 population” [Gold], New Zealand (0.763) just beat Australia (0.697) but according to the US Energy Information Administration, the (B) “2005 per capita fossil fuel-derived CO2 pollution in tonnes per person per year” [CO2] was 9.37 for New Zealand and 20.24 for Australia. Multiplying A by B yields a Gold MedalxCO2 Pollution (gold medals.tonnes CO2) [GoldxCO2] score of 7.149 for New Zealand and 14.107 for Australia.
For a detailed breakdown of Beijing Olympics involvement by country see: http://au.sports.yahoo.com/olympics/countries/#K ; for 2005 population data see G.M. Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1905” and http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com ; for the latest on the Beijing Olympics medal tally see Yahoo ; and for “2005 annual per capita fossil fuel-derived CO2 pollution in tonnes per person per year”.
The superb 2008 Beijing Olympics finished with China leading the World in the Olympic Gold Medal tally (51 Gold) but coming second in Total Medals (100) to the US (36 Gold medals, 110 Total Medals). However, in terms of “Gold Medals per Million of Population” China (0.039) was BELOW the World average (0.046) whereas the US (0.120) was ABOVE the World average.
Please note that this article continues on the next page:
Express yourself. Tell us your opinion.
Make a comment!
3 Responses
Not commenting on possible motives, but I think there are too many biases in this posting that seem to make the top outliers overly eco-unfriendly and the bottom outliers overly eco-friendly.
1st, India - winner of 0 gold medals, and China - winner of the most gold medals: Both are emerging as the worst possible environmental enemies but this fact is masked by the gold medals/capita which makes India seem overly concerned about humanity and the environment and China seem overly incompetent with respects to its ability to win gold medals. India did not send a capable Olympic team simply because it has neither the resources, interest, nor the cohesion to assemble an effective Olympic team. On the other hand China is simply too populous to rate high on any of the scores except for raw medal standings despite the huge amount of effort spent in producing Olympic athletes.
2nd, Jamaica - top gold medal per capita winner, and Indonesia near the bottom of the pile for the same.
These two countries have very little basis for comparison except that both are primarily recipients of exploitation by others mentioned in this posting. Jamaica’s high per capita gold medal rating is due not to resources spend on producing gold medalists but on the ability of the country’s natural environment to create good sprinters. A high per capita of naturally good sprinters should naturally produce a high per capita gold medal ranking. The countries CO2 excess is also a product of the exploitation by others and when combine with such a high per capita gold medal number makes it appear extraordinarily high on the profligacy list. On the other hand, the aforementioned exploitation so oppresses the Indonesian people that despite the countries abundance of natural wealth, very little of it ever trickles down to allow the population to seriously contend for Olympic Gold. So, Indonesia’s appearance at the bottom of the profligacy rating is hardly worth mentioning despite its poor environmental record (again most of its CO2 excess is incurred by countries that are currently subjecting it to crushing exploitation).
In summary its good to remember that 1 divide by any number greater than 1 is always less than 1, and any number divided by any other sufficiently larger number is always almost 0. The devil is in the details and when your making a detailed analysis, you must not forget the details.
The Green-ness Index presented is simply the product of 2 variables and obviously can conceivably yield the same result with particular High Gold/Low CO2 and Low Gold/High CO2 combinations.
It is merely a start at a more objective analysis of the global realities involved and the obscenity of massive, nationalist investment in irrelevant and flawed competition in a starving and dangerously polluted world.
It also shows up the dishonesty of lying, racist, holocaust-ignoring Mainstream media that report such flawed competitions with extraordinary precision (e.g. event times to the nearest 0.01 second) but ignore the horrendous concurrent realities e.g. the “annual death rate” is 6.2% for under-5 year old infants in US-, UK-, NATO- and Australian-occupied Afghanistan as compared to 10.2% for Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese in World War 2 (for which war crime Japanese generals were tried and hanged).
Chill dude, your bias is showing… I admire your tenacity for humanitarianism but we are on an environmental blog, yah?
I was just pointing out that you’re punishing the environmental innocents while making some of the guilty ones slip away.
Leave the innocents out of it or at least exonerate them. Don’t let your bias show you to be passing over some of the guilty ones at the same time as you’re flogging the innocents. It’s bad for you and bad for the environmental movement at the same time.
Recent Comments