TABLE OF CONTENTS Many thousands of industries have arisen during the four great Western transformations the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and the Computer Age. The automobile and electronics industries are the largest and most important of the current industries. They will be briefly discussed in the following text.
Until 1996, the automobile industry was the largest industry in the world. Its early shift from workshop manufacturing to mass production made cars affordable for billions of people. However, emissions of unburned hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, and carbon monoxide spread over urban areas and into the countryside, which was increasingly buried under asphalt and concrete roads. And the synthesis of plastics (used in automobiles) grew into a large, highly energy-intensive industry generating a variety of toxic pollutants previously never present in the biosphere and introducing huge numbers of nondecaying wastes into the environment.
Post-1945 developments amplified these trends. New environmental risks were introduced as the developed world entered the period of its most impressive economic growth, terminated only by the 1973 to 1974 quintupling of oil prices. In just 25 years, the consumption of primary commercial energy nearly tripled, electricity generation grew about 8-fold, car ownership increased 6-fold, and production of most kinds of synthetic materials grew more than 10-fold.
In the summer of 1970, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology first attempted a systematic evaluation of global environmental issues. Their summary of the Study of Critical Environmental Problems indicated the following relative importance as perceived at that time:...
