PRINCIPAL DETERMINANT OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES: AN ANALYSIS OF NATIONAL INTEREST

The developed nations by distorting and dominating the public sphere are creating hegemony over the developing countries. Through the national interest policies, they are creating a sense of deterrence and havoc among under-developed and less powerful countries and become responsible for environmental degradation. The paper tries to analyze how national interest leads to environmental destruction and the failure of environmental protocols. The study focuses on the role of developed countries, particularly the USA, in polluting global environment and their participation in environmental protocols. The study is mainly based on secondary data. The main sources of data are the Census reports, Websites, Research articles and Books. The study reveals that globally human life is suffering from various environmental issues like Ozone Layer Depletion, Global Warming, Climate change, Deforestation etc. The main cause of these environmental crises is mostly national interest and also it is the national interest that is becoming an obstacle in the way of addressing these issues through collective efforts. In case of USA, what comes first is its national interest in order to maintain its hegemony and uni-polar dominance in the world that is traced from its role in the Second World War and destruction of fauna and flora of two cities of Japan by dropping atom bombs. Further, on the name of “Global War on Terrorism” the US military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have had a serious impact on the natural environments of these countries. The study also revealed, that in spite of being a major source of global environmental pollution such as climate change, USA has shown its back when time had come to combat these global environmental challenges, with its withdrawal from the Paris agreement 2015 on climate change mitigation before the earliest possible effective date. The motive behind the withdrawn from the agreement was to protect US from loosing economic strength in the world. According to the agreement it has to provide funds and technology for global environmental protection and to reduce the emission of green house gases. Hence, consequently this burden is thrown on the shoulders of third world nations whose economic and technological strength made them incapable to combat these environmental challenges. So there is need to architect some institutional arrangements to facilitate a leap from narrowly defined national interests to a global regime and to entail distributive justice ability to pay approach for financial aids to combat climate change. The developed countries, particularly the USA, should come to front for addressing global problem of climate change.