Notizie positive

Why 2012 was the best year ever » The Spectator.

…In 1990, the UN announced Millennium Development Goals, the first of which was to halve the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015. It emerged this year
that the target was met in 2008. Yet the achievement did not merit an
official announcement, presumably because it was not achieved by any
government scheme but by the pace of global capitalism. Buying cheap
plastic toys made in China really is helping to make poverty history.
And global inequality? This, too, is lower now than any point in modern times. Globalisation means the world’s not just getting richer, but fairer too.

The doom-mongers will tell you that we cannot sustain worldwide
economic growth without ruining our environment. But while the rich
world’s economies grew by 6 per cent over the last seven years, fossil
fuel consumption in those countries fell
by 4 per cent. This remarkable (and, again, unreported) achievement has
nothing to do with green taxes or wind-farms. It is down to consumer
demand for more efficient cars and factories.

And what about the concerns that the oil would run out? Ministers
have spent years thinking of improbable new power sources. As it turns
out, engineers in America have found new ways of mining fossil fuel. The
amazing breakthroughs in ‘fracking’ technology mean that, in spite of
the world’s escalating population — from one billion to seven billion
over the last two centuries — we live in an age of energy abundance.

Advances in medicine and technology mean that people across the world
are living longer. The average life expectancy in Africa reached 55
this year. Ten years ago, it was 50. The number of people dying from Aids has been in decline for the last eight years. Deaths from malaria have fallen by a fifth in half a decade.

Nature can still wreak havoc. The storms which lashed America’s East
Coast in October proved that. But the speed of New York City’s recovery
shows a no-less-spectacular resilience. Man cannot control the weather,
but as countries grow richer, they can better guard against devastation.
The average windstorm kills about 2,000 in Bangladesh but fewer than 20 in America.
It’s not that America’s storms are mild; but that it has the money to
cope. As developing countries become richer, we can expect the death
toll from natural disasters to diminish — and the same UN extrapolations
that predict such threatening sea-level rises for Bangladesh also say
that, in two or three generations’ time, it will be as rich as Britain.

War has historically been humanity’s biggest killer. But in most of
the world today, a generation is growing up that knows little of it. The
Peace Research Institute in Oslo says there have been fewer war deaths
in the last decade than any time in the last century.

…Death rates for both lung and breast cancers have fallen
by more than a third over the last 40 years. Our cold winters still
kill people, but the number dying each year halved over the past
half-century. The winter death toll now stands
at 24,000 — still unacceptable in a first-world country, but an
improvement nonetheless. Britain’s national life expectancy, 78 a decade
ago, will hit 81 next year.