22 March 2005Robert J. Saiget
China's booming economic miracle is expanding at a highly unsustainable rate, creating tremendous pressures on resources while bankrupting the environment, a leading environmentalist warned Tuesday.
"I have a feeling we are on the edge of big changes. It is still difficult to see how this will develop but we are clearly pushing the envelope in so many ways and all at the same time," Lester Brown, the US-based director of the Earth Policy Institute, told AFP.
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"It could be runaway oil prices, climate change, there are so many things that can happen, food stocks could fall, grain prices could rise, water scarcities increase."
Brown was in Beijing for a series of lectures outlining grave consequences to the earth's ecology should China remain on a developmental path that seeks to emulate consumption patterns in the United States.
He will also receive an honorary degree from the China Academy of Sciences, the nation's most prestigious scientific research body.
"I sense the Chinese leadership knows how serious the problems are but with the overriding concerns for growth and job creation, they can't give the environment the attention it deserves," Brown said.
"They have tremendous problems with deforestation and desertification. Water tables are falling throughout the country.
"At some point things will break down. It's hard to say when, it could be five, 10 years, some changes are already happening."
China's growth over the last 26 years since economic liberalization has been "extraordinary," Brown said, but the sooner Beijing recognizes that its existing economic model cannot sustain economic progress, the better it would be for the entire world.
"We are consuming beyond the sustainable yield of the earth's natural systems," he said. "As we overcut, overplow, overpump, overgraze, and overfish, we are consuming not only the interest from our natural endowment, we are devouring the endowment itself. "In ecology, as in economics, this leads to bankruptcy," Brown said.
China has already replaced the United States as the world's leading consumer of most basic commodities such as grain, coal, and steel.
With an annual average urban income of 5,300 dollars, Chinese consumers are poised to reach US income levels by 2031 based on an average annual growth rate of 8.0 percent, said Brown.
China has averaged about 9.5 percent annual growth over the last two decades. If the Chinese consume resources in 2031 as voraciously as Americans do now, their grain consumption would be two thirds of current world production and oil use of 99 million barrels a day would exceed current world output of 79 million barrels per day, Brown warned.
In addition, China would consume more steel than the entire Western industrialized world does today and its meat consumption would be roughly four fifths of current world meat production.
"The point of this exercise of projections is not to blame China for consuming so much, but rather to learn what happens when a large segment of humanity moves quickly up the global economic ladder," he said.
"What we learn is that the economic model that evolved in the West -- the fossil-fuel-based, auto-centered, throwaway economy -- will not work for China simply because there are not enough resources."
Brown said the world needed to urgently turn to "plan B" before the geopolitics of oil, grain, and raw material scarcity led to political conflict and social disruption.
The new plan, he said, would be based not on fossil fuels but by harnessing renewable sources of energy, including wind power, hydropower, geothermal energy, solar cells, solar thermal power plants, and biofuels.
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