By Lester Brown
16 September, 2011
Earth Policy Institute
Earth Policy Institute
For almost as long as I
can remember we have been saying that the United States, with 5 percent
of the world’s people, consumes a third or more of the earth’s
resources. That was true. It is no longer true. Today China consumes
more basic resources than the United States does.
Among the key commodities such as grain, meat, oil,
coal, and steel, China consumes more of each than the United States
except for oil, where the United States still has a wide (though
narrowing) lead. China uses a quarter more grain than the United States.
Its meat consumption is double that of the United States. It uses three
times as much coal and four times as much steel.
These numbers reflect national consumption, but what
would happen if consumption per person in China were to catch up to
that of the United States? If we assume conservatively that China’s
economy slows from the 11 percent annual growth of recent years to 8
percent, then in 2035 income per person in China will reach the current
U.S. level.
If we also assume that the Chinese will spend their
income more or less as Americans do today, then we can translate their
income into consumption. If, for example, each person in China consumes
paper at the current American rate, then in 2035 China’s 1.38 billion
people will use four fifths as much paper as is produced worldwide
today. There go the world’s forests.
If Chinese grain consumption per person in 2035 were
to equal the current U.S. level, China would need 1.5 billion tons of
grain, nearly 70 percent of the 2.2 billion tons the world’s farmers now
harvest each year.
If we assume that in 2035 there are three cars for
every four people in China, as there now are in the United States, China
will have 1.1 billion cars. The entire world currently has just over
one billion. To provide the needed roads, highways, and parking lots,
China would have to pave an area equivalent to more than two thirds the
land it currently has in rice.
By 2035 China would need 85 million barrels of oil a
day. The world is currently producing 86 million barrels a day and may
never produce much more than that. There go the world’s oil reserves.
What China is teaching us is that the western
economic model—the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway
economy—will not work for the world. If it does not work for China, it
will not work for India, which by 2035 is projected to have an even
larger population than China. Nor will it work for the other 3 billion
people in developing countries who are also dreaming the “American
dream.” And in an increasingly integrated global economy, where we all
depend on the same grain, oil, and steel, the western economic model
will no longer work for the industrial countries either.
The overriding challenge for our generation is to
build a new economy—one that is powered largely by renewable sources of
energy, that has a much more diversified transport system, and that
reuses and recycles everything. We have the technology to build this new
economy, an economy that will allow us to sustain economic progress.
But can we muster the political will to translate this potential into
reality?
Lester Brown is an United States
environmentalist, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, and founder and
president of the Earth Policy Institute, a nonprofit research
organization based in Washington, D.C. BBC Radio commentator Peter Day
calls him "one of the great pioneer environmentalists."
Copyright © 2011 Earth Policy Institute