Fw: EARTH: China's American Style Development Means Ecosystem Collapse

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> ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY NEWS TODAY

> China's " American Style " Development Means Ecosystem Collapse

> ***********************************************

> EcoEarth.Info a project of Ecological Internet, Inc.

>

> http://www.ecoearth.info/ - EcoEarth.Info Environment Portal

>

> May 13, 2006

> OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by Dr. Glen Barry, EcoEarth.Info

>

> Lester Brown eloquently provides the rationale for all of

> Ecological Internet's work in his comprehensive environmental

> sustainability essay entitled " China forcing world to rethink

> its economic future " . In it he states " global civilization today

> is on an economic path that is environmentally unsustainable, a

> path that is leading us toward economic decline and eventual

> collapse. " There are simply not enough resources or ecosystems

> in the World for China, India and other developing countries to

> follow the Western economic model without utter ecological

> collapse and social mayhem. There can be no economy with

> ecological systems as an underpinning.

>

> " The fossil-fuel-based, auto-centered, throwaway economy--is not

> going to work for... developing countries who are also dreaming

> the 'American dream.' 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. " Brown identifies three broad imperatives to

> address the global ecological crisis including restructuring the

> economy to sustainability, eradicating poverty while reducing

> population, and restoring (and protecting) natural ecosystems.

>

> Ecological Internet exists in order to promote, inform and

> actively pursue these policies. Finding a way to achieve just,

> equitable global ecological sustainability is the challenge of

> all of humanity's remaining time. Ecological Internet is

> providing information and action opportunities to promote

> necessary policy to begin this transformation. We are currently

> 25% of the way towards raising the funds necessary to allow our

> work on behalf of your Earth to continue for the next six

> months. Please support us at http://www.ecoearth.info/donate/ .

> g.b.

> Comment at:

> http://www.ecoearth.info/blog/2006/05/chinas_american_style_developm.asp

>

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>

> RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:

>

> Title: China forcing world to rethink its economic future

> Source: Copyright 2006, Yomiuri Shimbun

> May 14, 2006

> Byline: Lester R. Brown

>

> 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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