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Lester Brown, who scared the world by asking "Who will feed China" in 1994, said yesterday that, "the US has become the greatest threat to world energy."
Brown, president and founder of the Earth Policy Institute, based in the US, called for China to give up its model of economic development, which evolved in the US and is characterized by inefficiency and pollution.
"The fossil-fuel based, auto-centered economy of the US threatens not only the world energy supply, but also the climate," said Brown during his stay in Beijing to attend the 21st Century Forum. He sharply criticized the US' energy policy in an exclusive interview with Xinhua.
The US has five percent of the world's total population and consumes 40 percent of the world's resources. It also leads in petroleum consumption, consuming 204,000 barrels a day in 2004, over three times as much the amount of oil used daily in China. Accordingly, the US together with a dozen other developed nations emits 80 percent of the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
"Humanity's collective demands have exceeded the earth's regenerative capacity by 26 percent," Brown said. "It is fearful that there are still large numbers of people dreaming the 'American dream,' hoping to consume like the Americans."
According to his projections, if the Chinese consume resources in 2031 as voraciously as Americans do now, China would consume 1.352 billion tons of grain, about two thirds of the entire 2004 world grain harvest. It would need 99 million barrels of oil a day, more than the current world production of 79 million barrels daily.
The steadily growing supply of oil fueled the phenomenal 17-fold growth in the world economy during the 20th century. Currently, many analysts anticipate an imminent downturn in oil production.
"The transition from a world of expanding oil to one of shrinking oil will be a shift of seismic proportions. Oil prices may climb higher than any we can readily imagine," said Brown.
He held that the current oil price remains far below the fuel's real cost. The price of US$2 per gallon for gasoline reflects only the cost of oil pumping, refining and gasoline delivery. It excludes the costs billowing military costs of protecting access to oil supplies; the health care costs for treating respiratory illnesses ranging from asthma to emphysema; and most importantly, the costs of global warming.
If these costs were added to the US$2 cost of the gasoline itself, the price motorists would pay at the pump would be US$11 per gallon, he said.
"Faulty accounting systems that do not tell the truth by excluding social cost are very dangerous. They could lead to global bankruptcy and economic decline," he said.
The first big test of the international community's capacity to manage scarcity may come with oil or could come with grain, Brown acknowledged. What one can learn from the above projections about China is that the economic model evolved in the west does not work for China simply because there are not enough resources.
Similarly, the fossil-fuel-based, auto-centered, throwaway economy will not work for India, nor will it work for the other 3 billion people in the developing world, he said. "In an increasingly integrated global economy where all countries are vying for the same dwindling resources it will not continue to work for the 1.2 billion people who currently live in affluent societies either," Brown added.
"The world needs a new economic model," he said, titling his proposed model "Plan B." A new economy that should harness renewable sources like wind power and hydropower will design a diversified transport system to maximize mobility rather than just increase automobile use, and will reuse and recycles materials with the goal of zero emission and zero waste. According to Brown, a component of Plan B uses technologies already on the market. "Almost everything we need to do to move the world economy onto an environmentally sustainable path has been done by one or more countries," he said.
"The challenge is to build a new economy and to do it at wartime speed before we miss so many of the nature's deadlines that the economic system begins to unravel," Brown said.
(Xinhua News Agency September 8, 2005)
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