The problem with China isn’t it’s economy, it’s its government and the widespread embrace of a quasi-racialist but definately nationalist ideology that puts American Manifest destiny to shame.
But what is a resource? In reality, it’s a far more ephemeral thing than simply a finite amount of objects to be consumed. Over time, not only does efficiency in comsumption increase, but also what is consumed. As things get more rare, they get more expensive, which makes people move naturally to other solutions. So it’s simply not that simple.
Yes it is more complex than just saying ‘we will run out of X resource quicker’.
There are many subsystems or processes that can be modelled within a global resource system. As resource and waste flows move around, there are concentrations of certain resources in some areas at the expense of others.
For example, a human requires a certain amount of fertile land and water to maintain a certain standard of living given certain efficiences of production.
There is a limit on the amount of arable land.
There is a limit on the amount of shunting of water around the system.
With other consumables, besides food, which improve our standard of living it is the same story. Medicine, transport, Xbox, etc all require energy, water and food for production.
Also: Many agricultural practices are diminishing the productivity of the land by permanantly damaging the soil.
Also: Species extinction, deforestation, aquifer destruction are diminishing standards of living.
Improved efficiencies can eke out a little more, say, food from a unit of nutrient, but there are
definite limits. And as efficiencies increase, so to does consumption, which leads to greater demand on a resource.
Of course, I also hope that everything will work out just fine and dandy.
The problem here is that a truly serious drain on resources, out of all proportion to what might comfortably be absorbed by world markets and technology, might arise.
For example, the government’s aim is for every Chinese to eat 200 eggs per year. That works out as requiring the entire grain harvest of Norway per year, just for Chinese eggs.
Now, if China solely follows its own national interests, then here is what might, just might, be beneficial to China’s national interest:
Outright protectionism
Systematic violation of Intellectual Property Law
Annexation of the Korean peninsula
Withdrawal from World Trade Agreements
Forceful takeover of SE Asian oilfields
Mass dumping of toxic waste in the Pacific
Deliberate destruction of politically, economically or militarily inconvenient foreign satellites
Now, if countries acting solely in their own national interests is to be encouraged then, should the Chinese ever view any of the above as being so, are we to encourage them?
As the price of a resource (say Panda bear claws) goes up, the consumption of them goes down. At the same time the market rewards for finding a replacement (say feral Chihuahua claws) goes sky-high.
Consider the example of whale oil, once a valuable resource for lighting. As whales got scarce the development of the petroleum industry replaced it with better and cheaper alternatives.
Can you name anything important we have ever run out of?
Of course even I admitt here is some sort of upper limit, but the Chinese (probably) won’t get us near it.
Oh, I think I got the cigar. The New Economy was one of the tenets of the dotcom boom, and the New Economy was a central element of the aricle, along with the predictions.
The current world levels of consumption are unsustainable, as they stand now. You can say what you like about prices equalising demand and supply etc, but ultimately the fact remains that we only have so much iron ore, hydrocarbons etc left.
Our economies depend on exploiting resources which will not last for ever. If China grows, and it begins using resources at the level which developed countries do now then the point at which we start to run out of resources will just come quicker. The way i look at it, there are 3 possibilies for the future:
We do nothing, and eventually raw materials start to become very scarce, triggering wars and lowering standards of living.
We get more resources. The only place we could get them from is space. We would have to develop our space program, and start mining asteroids etc.
We reuse resources. Essentially we would have to switch our economies from running on extracted raw materials to running on recycled resources. Everything would have to be recycled - plastics, metals, paper you name it. We would need a lot of energy to do this, which would mean developing clean renewables.
I think what we should be doing now is investing in clean energy and recycling, and encouraging China to do the same. A massive space program to acquire resources to simply too expensive at this point.
Let’s see if I can explain it in simple terms that even the average environmentalist can understand. When you have less of something, the price goes up. When more people want something, the price goes up.
Q: How much would the last barrel of oil cost?
A: Nothing. Because economic pressure would force us to turn to an alternative long before we used it all.
Norway @ 2M tons/yer (mostly wheat, barley, oats) (pop 4M)
US @ 300M tons/yr (mostly wheat, corn, barley) (pop 280M)
China @ 120M tons/yr (mostly rice, and I forget what else) (pop 1280M)
My God! China would require 60 Norways to produce it’s grain!
If China had the same per-capita production capacity as the US, they could produce over 4 times as much grain. That may be optimistic but for some reason I doubt they are using the latest technology.
You misunderstand, m: It is not that China would require all of Norway’s grain, it is that it would require an increase the size of Norway’s grain to feed the chickens to produce the eggs. This is solely a consequence of the same Chinese person changing their consumerist habits to a slightly less efficient (grainwise) diet.
As I said, I agree that much of the increased intensity in consumption could be absorbed by markets and technology. But when eg. worldwide fish stocks are already depleted, I believe it would take a binding international agreement to prevent countries simply exhausting the last stocks in the world for immediate profit.
Yes, and 90% of the American people used to be involved in the production, distribution, and making of food. Now it’s less than 5%.
If China gets wealthier, it will require FEWER resources for the making of its food, because it will become much more efficient at it. My grandfather raised chickens - he had a few hundred in a coop, and it was a ton of work (mine, mostly) to keep it clean, feed them, kill them, pluck them, and prepare them for a supper. The farm was only a little more than self-sustaining in the chicken department - he raised enough for the family, and sold a few at market.
My uncle raises chickens. He has an industrial chicken farm. On a space no larger than my grandfather’s farm, he raises HALF A MILLION chickens. They are in huge barns, with automatic feeders, waterers, waste disposal systems, etc.
China is nowhere NEAR the level of agricultural efficiency we enjoy in the west. As they get wealthier, their people will have more food, and they will consume fewer natural resources to make that food.
Wealth also allows you to expend more resources on environmental matters. Contrast the environment in Russia with that in the U.S. China will soon be one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, despite having an economy a fraction of the size of the U.S. economy.
The others are right - while iron ore, coal, oil, diamonds, and uranium are all finite resources, none of them are utterly unreplaceable. So from that standpoint, there are no limits to growth. All we need is energy, and we’ve got a great big fusion engine in the middle of our solar system that provides more energy than our world could ever possibly use. We have asteroids that are essentially solid steel - we just have to go and get them. We can synthesize oil to make plastics to replace steels. For that matter, we can make entire structures like airplanes and cars out of composite materials that consist of nothing more than glass and resin. And we discover newer, better materials all the time.
When will the no-growth gloom and doomsters learn? Paul Erlich lost a famous bet to Julian Simon - when Erlich said in the 70’s that we would be starving by the 90’s, and there would be massive shortages of oil, steel, and other non-renewables, Simon bet $5,000 that if Erlich picked a list of 10 resources of his choosing, that ten years later the average price of those resources would go down. Erlich eagerly accepted the bet - and a couple of years ago, paid up.
There are no limits to growth. A wealthy China is a good thing.
The big caveat is the political atmosphere. China is still a repressive dictatorship. That will not only limit how much it can grow, but it opens the door for evil gaining more power as China becomes wealthier. We really, really don’t need another Soviet Union in the world. So let’s hope that China continues reforming, and by the time it becomes a superpower it is a benign one.
I understand that China would not require all of Norways grain. I believe you were were using Norway as a comparison to imply that the situation is worse than it is. It is a misuse of statistical data (My God! Half of all Americans are below the median intelligence level!).
I am trying to explain to you that Norways grain production relative to China’s demand is immaterial. It is less than a 2% increase in production which IMHO is easily acheivable.
Maybe. But people can’t eat binding international agreements. Companies don’t damage the environment because they are evil. They damage the environment because that is an unfortunate byproduct of requiring food, transportation, housing and clothing.
Look, if it were up to the stupid hippies, the world would be overgrown with alfalfa sprouts and hemp plants. We would all be living in clothes that feel like burlap, all the veal cows and chickens would roam free, whales would be like deer of the sea (argh!! Methinks we struck another whale maties!) and most of us would starve.
It’s not that I am against protecting the environment. I just think most environmentalists are morons when it comes to actually solving any problems.
Originally posted by Zenster
rjung, in the USA, such feelings do not go down to the genetic level.
Zenster is indeed engaging in hyperbole. Nonetheless, China has a long standing cultural and political tradition – and I’m talking thousands of years – of regarding itself as the center of civilization and the central source of power and legitimacy. There is simply no analogue in Western culture. The closest might be the Vatican in the middle ages which claimed sole authority to invest Christian rulers. That is, however, an extremely pale echo.
Throw-away political sniping aside, even the current U.S. administration does not have ideas remotely resembling that of the Chinese. The closest I can come in Western terms is to say that China could easily develop a world view that combines the Vatican, manifest destiny and a sort of Chinese anschluss with a healthy dose of old-fashioned imperialism. This is not a pleasant prospect, especially for China’s neighbors.
And that’s a 2% increase just in China’s production. China could easily increase production this much with a minimum of effort merely by reducing the spoilage rate.
More to the point, this increase is vanishingly small when you consider world grain production. I’ve no doubt that either the U.S. or Europe would happily sell China enough grain out of the surplus they already produce for every Chinese person to eat foie gras 200 times a year if the Chinese were willing and able to pay for it.
That depends on your definition of evil. Companies damage the environment because it profits them to do so.
If it takes international agreements to stop overfishing, then that’s what it takes. People starve? That sucks, but they’ll starve as well after the fish are gone. So I’d go for the binding international agreements any day of the week.
If it was up to the stupid conservatives, we’d be still be dumping nuclear waste in the ocean, global warming would be officially treated as a psuedoscience, and we would let the free market take care of overfishing. See, I can rashly characterize the opposing group too! Except your characterization is not remotely based on reality. Mine is just an exaggeration.
So you want to protect the environment, but you don’t want to involve those who actually care about it. Great… tell me how that works out.
