[Mb-civic] Fw: Earth Policy News - China Forcing World to Rethink Its Economic Future

[Harold Sifton]

> CHINA FORCING WORLD TO RETHINK ITS ECONOMIC FUTURE
> http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB2/index.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," says Lester Brown in his new book, Plan B
> 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (W.W.
> Norton & Company).
>
> "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," says Brown,
> President and Founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington,
> D.C.-based independent environmental research organization.
>
> 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,
> Brown notes in Plan B 2.0, which was produced with major funding from the
> Lannan Foundation and the U.N. Population Fund.
>
> 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?" asks Brown. "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 will
> 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, Brown notes, 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 twenty-first 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," says Brown.
>
> "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, some 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 22 miles to the gallon, compared with
> 55 miles per gallon 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 super-efficient 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 miles 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 capacity would allow 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 invest in thousands of wind farms across the country
> 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 the equivalent of
> 50¢-a-gallon 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," notes Brown. "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 of additional expenditures each year.
>
> A strategy for eradicating poverty will not succeed if an economy's
> environmental support systems are collapsing. Brown says, "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 per year."
>
> Combining social goals and earth restoration components into a Plan B
> budget means an additional annual expenditure of $161 billion. 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," adds Brown. "The world is now spending $975 billion annually
> for military purposes. The U.S. 2006 military budget of $492 billion,
> 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 twenty-first 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 Plan B budget
> by shifting resources from the $492 billion spent on the military, it
> still would be spending more for military purposes than all other NATO
> members plus Russia and China 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," says Brown.
> "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."
>
> - end -
>
>
> Media Contact: Reah Janise Kauffman (202) 496.9290 x 12
> rjkauffman at earthpolicy.org