Wednesday, June 20, 2007

US States Renamed For Countries With Similar GDPs - and global warming effects


Thanks to Strange Maps - for publishing and to Mark Grimes and Josh Friedman at omidyar.net for pointing to it.

I love this map – and find it shocking. How can my home state of Oklahoma – which I remember as cows and oil wells – have the same GNP as Phillipines?

“Annual GDP represents the market value of all goods and services produced within a country in a year.”

How can Rhode Island equal Vietnam? Especially considering what half of Vietnam was able to do to France and the US.

Illinois and Mexico?

I imagine that to a large degree GDP reflects carbon footprint. Don’t you imagine this angers people in other countries? That one state, Texas, contributes as much to global warming as Canada? Alabama (!) as much as Iran. Arksansas and Pakistan. New Jersey and Russia?

The US is in real danger of being further isolated as the effects and the need to address global warming become clearer.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Glad to see you blogging again!

Dario said...

Hanes, I'm a newcomer to your blog, and I have to say that map was very interesting - definitely puts some perspective on our wealth.

...That said, I'm hoping California surpasses France and gets closer to Japanese or German economy sometime soon.