China Is Bankrupting the Environment

honglake

China Is Bankrupting the Environment  
作者: GGF China [GGF中国资料] 时间: 2005-03-24  
www.greengrants.org.cn  
China is bankrupting the environment
Robert J. Saiget
Posted Tue, 22 Mar 2005

China‘s booming economic miracle is expanding at a highly unsustainable
rate, creating tremendous pressures on resources while bankrupting the
environment, a leading environmentalist has warned.
"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.
So many things could happen
"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.
Environment will break down
"At some point things will break down. It‘s hard to say when, it could
be
five, ten years, some changes are already happening."
China‘s growth over the last 26 years since economic liberalisation has
been
"extraordinary," Brown said, but the sooner Beijing recognises 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.
World‘s leading consumer
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 $5300, Chinese consumers are
poised
to reach US income levels by 2031 based on an average annual growth
rate of
eight percent, said Brown.
Growth of 9.5 percent over last 20 years 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
industrialised world does today and its meat consumption would be
roughly
four fifths of current world meat production.
Not enough resources
"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.  


来自: GGF China

编辑： wenbo （共提交168篇文章）