China's threat to environment

I read this interesting article yesterday in the Guardian. It is about how the ever expanding population of China was becoming dangerous to our environment, especially to the earth’s resources.

Some of the facts and figures from the article are as follows:

• China has now overtaken America as the world's leading resource consumer
• In 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 of each of these than the US except for oil
• It consumes nearly twice as much meat - 67m tonnes compared with 39m tonnes in the US; and more than twice as much steel - 258m tonnes to 104m
• If China's economy expands at 8% a year in the decades ahead, its income per person will reach the current US level in 2031. If at that point China's resource consumption per person were the same as that in the US today, its 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. Say goodbye to the world's forests
• If China were to have three cars for every four people - as in the US - it would have 1.1bn cars. Worldwide today there are 800m cars. To provide the roads and parking spaces to accommodate such a vast fleet, China would have to pave an area comparable to the land it now plants in rice - 29m hectares (72m acres)
• And it would use 99m barrels of oil a day; the world currently produces only 84m barrels daily, and may never produce much more.
  

The author, Lester R Brown - president of the Earth Policy Institute - is suggesting that the western economic model - the fossil fuel-based, car-centred, throwaway economy - is not going to work for China. And he is saying it’s time to build a new economy

What is a news economy then?

According to Lester:

Glimpses of the new economy can already be seen in the wind farms of
western Europe, the solar rooftops of Japan, the fast-growing hybrid car fleet
of the US, 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.

In this economic restructuring, the biggest challenges will come in the
energy economy as the world strives simultaneously to reduce carbon emissions
and dependence on oil.

Among the new sources of energy - wind, solar cells, solar thermal,
geothermal, small-scale hydro and biomass - wind is developing fastest, hinting
at what the new energy economy will look like.

Read the full article - A new world order – here.

Let’ hope all these will work and cut down our dependence solely on oil for the sake of Mother Earth and our future generation.

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