Title: China forcing world to rethink its economic future
Source: Copyright 2006, Yomiuri Shimbun
Date: May 14, 2006
By Lester R. Brown
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/world/20060514TDY10001.htm
Our global civilization today is on an economic path that is
environmentally unsustainable, a path that is leading us toward
economic decline and eventual collapse.
Environmental scientists have been saying for some time that the
global economy is being slowly undermined by environmental
trends of human origin, including shrinking forests, expanding
deserts, falling water tables, eroding soils, collapsing
fisheries, rising temperatures, melting ice, rising seas, and
increasingly destructive storms.
Although it is obvious that no society can survive the decline
of its environmental support systems, many people are not yet
convinced of the need for economic restructuring. But this is
changing now that China has eclipsed the United States in the
consumption of most basic resources.
Among the basic commodities–grain and meat in the food sector,
oil and coal in the energy sector, and steel in the industrial
sector–China now consumes more than the United States of each
of these except for oil. It consumes nearly twice as much meat
(67 million tons compared with 39 million tons) and more than
twice as much steel (258 million to 104 million tons).
These numbers are about total consumption. But what if China
reaches the U.S. consumption level per person? If China’s
economy continues to expand at 8 percent a year, its income per
person will reach the current U.S. level in 2031.
If at that point China’s per capita resource consumption were
the same as in the United States today, then its projected 1.45
billion people would consume the equivalent of two thirds of the
current world grain harvest. China’s paper consumption would be
double the world’s current production. There go the world’s
forests.
If China one day has three cars for every four people–U.S.
style–it would have 1.1 billion cars. The whole world today has
800 million cars. To provide the roads, highways, and parking
lots to accommodate such a vast fleet, China would have to pave
an area equal to the land it now plants in rice. It would need
99 million barrels of oil a day. Yet the world currently
produces 84 million barrels per day and may never produce much
more.
The Western economic model–the fossil-fuel-based, auto-
centered, throwaway economy–is not going to work for China. If
it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which by
2031 is projected to have a population even larger than China’s.
Nor will it work for the 3 billion other people in developing
countries who are also dreaming the “American dream.”
And, in an increasingly integrated world economy, where all
countries are competing for the same oil, grain, and steel, the
existing economic model will not work for industrial countries
either. China is helping us see that the days of the old economy
are numbered.
Sustaining our early 21st-century global civilization now
depends on shifting to a renewable energy-based, reuse/recycle
economy with a diversified transport system. Business as usual–
Plan A–cannot take us where we want to go. It is time for Plan
B, time to build a new economy and a new world.
Plan B has three components–1) a restructuring of the global
economy so that it can sustain civilization; 2) an all-out
effort to eradicate poverty, stabilize population, and restore
hope in order to elicit participation of the developing
countries; and 3) a systematic effort to restore natural
systems.
Glimpses of the new economy can be seen in the wind farms of
western Europe, the solar rooftops of Japan, the fast-growing
hybrid car fleet of the United States, the reforested mountains
of South Korea, and the bicycle-friendly streets of Amsterdam.
Virtually everything we need to do to build an economy that will
sustain economic progress is already being done in one or more
countries.
Among the new sources of energy–wind, solar cells, solar
thermal, geothermal, small-scale hydro, biomass–wind is
emerging as a major energy source. In Europe, which is leading
the world into the wind era, about 40 million people now get
their residential electricity from wind farms. The European Wind
Energy Association projects that by 2020, half of the region’s
population–195 million Europeans–will be getting their
residential electricity from wind.
Wind energy is growing fast for six reasons: It is abundant,
cheap, inexhaustible, widely distributed, clean and climate-
benign. No other energy source has this combination of
attributes.
For the U.S. automotive fuel economy, the key to greatly
reducing oil use and carbon emissions is gas-electric hybrid
cars. The average new car sold in the United States last year
got 9.3 kilometers per liter, compared with 23.2 kilometers per
liter for the Toyota Prius. If the United States decided for oil
security and climate stabilization reasons to replace its entire
fleet of passenger vehicles with superefficient gas-electric
hybrids over the next 10 years, gasoline use could easily be cut
in half. This would involve no change in the number of cars or
kilometers driven, only a shift to the most efficient automotive
propulsion technology now available.
Beyond this, a gas-electric hybrid with an additional storage
battery and a plug-in feature would enable us to use electricity
for short distance driving, such as the daily commute or grocery
shopping. This could cut U.S. gasoline use by an additional 20
percent, for a total reduction of 70 percent. Then, if we were
to invest in thousands of wind farms across the United States to
feed cheap electricity into the grid, we could do most short-
distance driving with wind energy, dramatically reducing both
carbon emissions and the pressure on world oil supplies.
Using timers to recharge batteries with electricity coming from
wind farms during the low demand hours between 1 and 6 a.m.
costs 50 U.S. cents a gallon (about 14.6 yen-per-liter) of
gasoline. We have not only an inexhaustible alternative to
dwindling reserves of oil, but an incredibly cheap one.
Building an economy that will sustain economic progress requires
a cooperative worldwide effort. This means eradicating poverty
and stabilizing population–in effect, restoring hope among the
world’s poor. Eradicating poverty accelerates the shift to
smaller families. Smaller families in turn help to eradicate
poverty.
The principal line items in the budget to eradicate poverty are
investments in universal primary school education; school lunch
programs for the poorest of the poor; basic village-level health
care, including vaccinations for childhood diseases; and
reproductive health and family planning services for all the
world’s women. In total, reaching these goals will take 68
billion dollars of additional expenditures each year.
A strategy for eradicating poverty will not succeed if an
economy’s environmental support systems are collapsing. This
means putting together an earth restoration budget–one to
reforest the earth, restore fisheries, eliminate overgrazing,
protect biological diversity, and raise water productivity to
the point where we can stabilize water tables and restore the
flow of rivers. Adopted worldwide, these measures require
additional expenditures of 93 billion dollars per year.
Combining social goals and earth restoration components into a
Plan B budget means an additional annual expenditure of 161
billion dollars. Such an investment is huge, but it is not a
charitable act. It is an investment in the world in which our
children will live.
If we fail to build a new economy before decline sets in, it
will not be because of a lack of fiscal resources, but rather
because of obsolete priorities. The world is now spending 975
billion dollars annually for military purposes. The U.S. 2006
military budget of 492 billion dollars, accounting for half of
the world total, goes largely to the development and production
of new weapon systems. Unfortunately, these weapons are of
little help in curbing terrorism, nor can they reverse the
deforestation of the Earth or stabilize climate.
The military threats to national security today pale beside the
trends of environmental destruction and disruption that threaten
the economy and thus our early 21st-century civilization itself.
New threats call for new strategies. These threats are
environmental degradation, climate change, the persistence of
poverty, and the loss of hope.
The U.S. military budget is totally out of sync with these new
threats. If the United States were to underwrite the entire 161
billion dollars Plan B budget by shifting resources from the 492
billion dollars spent on the military, it still would be
spending more for military purposes than all other members of
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization plus China and Russia
combined.
Of all the resources needed to build an economy that will
sustain economic progress, none is more scarce than time. With
climate change we may be approaching the point of no return. The
temptation is to reset the clock. But we cannot. Nature is the
timekeeper.
It is decision time. Like earlier civilizations that got into
environmental trouble, we can decide to stay with business as
usual and watch our global economy decline and eventually
collapse. Or we can shift to Plan B, building an economy that
will sustain economic progress.
It is hard to find the words to express the gravity of our
situation and the momentous nature of the decision we are about
to make. How can we convey the urgency of moving quickly? Will
tomorrow be too late?
One way or another, the decision will be made by our generation.
Of that there is little doubt. But it will affect life on Earth
for all generations to come.
Brown is president of the Earth Policy Institute–whose Web site
is www. earthpolicy.org–and author of “Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a
Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble.
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“A war of aggression is the supreme international crime.” — Robert Jackson,
former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor
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