Last week, Daily Grist reported -- somewhat tongue in cheek -- that China had surpassed the U.S. as the world's largest overall consumer. It's all part of our ongoing obsession with China's boggling growth, which is, from the environmentalist's point of view, probably the single most significant socioeconomic trend in the world right now.
We've gotten several letters since then yelling at us for being "anti-China." You see, China has four times as many people as the U.S., so on a per capita basis, Americans consume much, much more and produce much, much more waste.
Yes, yes, Americans are the evilest, forever and always. Bring me my hairshirt! Can we have our green credentials back now?
But still. The fact that China recently passed us, and has four times as many people, means that it's going to get way bigger. Huge. Fast. If it develops along the same lines as the U.S., using the same technologies and fuel sources, we are all screwed. The earth cannot handle another U.S.-style consumer, four times the size of the original.
The answer is not to try to stop China from developing -- as if such a thing were remotely in the realm of possibility -- or to demonize it. The answer is to do everything we can to try to make China a showcase for every sustainable development trick in the book. The Chinese want prosperity, just as we do, so let's help them leapfrog, get there without sucking up the rest of the world's oil and accelerating climate change. Given its closed political system, there's a limit to what Western greens can do, but at the very least we should be paying attention and doing what we can. There's evidence that China's government gets this, anyway.
Obviously, this should be done in conjunction with -- not instead of -- working to make Western industry and lifestyles more sustainable as well.
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jdhlax Posted 7:54 am
23 Feb 2005
Decades ago, the U.S. could have become a world leader in relatively "sustainable development," to the extent that the term is not an oxymoron. For example, we could have completely banned private autos from urban areas while building good public transit, could have required those urban areas to be surrounded with agriculture to feed them, and could have required every building that uses any electricity to have its roof covered with solar panels. Instead, Americans built a totally unsustainable society, based on attaining the most material wealth at the cost of extreme ecological and environmental degradation and destruction.
I cannot envision anyone from China listening to someone from the U.S. talking about sustainabile development. This talk would have to come from places that actually take it at least somewhat seriously, like Western Europe. American environmentalists have no way to make China do anything, and we'd be seen as hypocrites if we tried to convince the Chinese to develop sustainably.
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Japhet Posted 2:38 pm
23 Feb 2005
Nonetheless, the U.S. can't say much. We've had the luxury of a smaller population and an entire continent to tear up and smoke out. It wasn't until people began becoming adversely affected that the government stepped in and created the Clean Air/Water Acts (thank god we still have those...oh wait a sec).
But another concern that is outside this discussion is the affect the booming Asian economy, which rests on China, will have on the U.S. That in itself is a whole other threat that I think is interwoven with the environmental argument.
Japhet
Jay Els
Educate, Motivate and Bring About Change. http://www.ran.org
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