Innovation and service are the first things to go. Who would have thought that?
Want to see a quick and obvious example of how our waste and greed are going to be our downfall? Look to China, which is trying ever so hard to emulate America’s opulence.
China has emerged as a global force that is driving consumption and production of almost everything through the roof, according to Vital Signs 2005, the latest annual pulse-taking from the venerable Worldwatch Institute, published today.
This isn’t exactly news. For years, hand-wringing “what-if” scenarios have considered the environmental impacts of a billion-plus Chinese aspiring to Americans’ levels of consumption. But, as Vital Signs shows, those scenarios are no longer hypothetical. Exploding growth in China is helping to boost the global economy, but it also is driving up consumption of natural resources, increasing prices of essential raw materials, and pushing up pollution levels around the world. (Apollo says, “Think oil.”)
Example: China’s building boom has helped push world steel production up by a third over the last five years. China now produces just over a fourth of the world’s steel — an essential input for its mushrooming industrial and urban infrastructure, as well as for the production of cars and other goods, and is a voracious buyer of steel from other countries, leading to shortages and price spikes in some areas.
“In terms of scale, it is as if all of Europe, Russia, and North and South America were simultaneously to undertake a century’s worth of economic development in a few decades,” says Worldwatch.
Steel is just the beginning. China is using its massive foreign exchange earnings from being the world’s low-cost manufacturer of choice — producing goods for the Gaps, Walmarts, and Reeboks of the world — to buy up other resources from around the globe. The global grain harvest shot up by 8% to over 2 billion tons last year, driven in part by China’s rising consumption and changing diets. Production of meat and fish — the latter increasingly derived from environmentally problematic fish farms — also hit new highs. One result is that grain reserves are at historically low levels, leaving the world vulnerable to higher prices should this year’s harvest be hurt by adverse weather, says Worldwatch.
“From Africa to South America, Chinese and Indian companies are now competing with American and European firms for access to the few remaining frontiers of the world oil industry. This struggle for supplies is likely to intensify in the next few years. The biggest losers will be countries that have virtually no impact on the world oil market — poor oil-importing nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.”
In 2003, China passed Japan to become the world’s second largest petroleum consumer. The International Energy Agency predicts that by 2030 China will import 10 million barrels per day, equal to the current U.S. total and almost twice Japan’s current level. Where all that oil will come from — and how much it will cost — is anybody’s guess. (WC)