Global Economic Meltdown, Reality & Co2
Isaac Hayes - 17th April 2009The Chinese are guilty of emulating the American economic model, and the lessons the Chinese drew from their international experiences are often based on sprawl development, private automobile ownership, and highly energy-consumptive practices.
One of the Chinese official's most fateful choices was to promote the automobile industry as a pillar of China's economy, and China's car industry is the world's third largest, but many of its cities are paralyzed by traffic, the inhabitants are choking on the fumes, and according to one projection, the number of cars on Chinese roads will grow from 33 million to 130 million during the next 12 years.
Imagine the Co2 increase!
Motor vehicles now account for no more than 3 or 4 percent of China's greenhouse-gas emissions, but the industry is still nascent.
In 2006, an official at China's State Council said environmental damage (everything from crop loss to the price of healthcare) cost 10 percent of its gross domestic product – all of the economy's celebrated growth
China's growth rate takes no account of the environmental devastation the economic boom has caused.
The emergence of China as a dominant economic power is an epochal event, occasioning the most massive and rapid redistribution of the earth's resources in human history.
China’s appetite for raw materials drives up international commodity prices and shipping rates while its middle class, projected to jump to 700 million by 2020.
The catch is that China has become not just the world's manufacturer but its despoiler, on a scale as monumental as its economic expansion. A fourth of China is now desert. More than three-fourths of its forests have disappeared.
A miasma of lead, mercury, sulfur dioxide, and other elements of coal-burning and car exhaust hovers over most Chinese cities, and roughly 70 percent of the world's discarded computers and electronic equipment ends up in China, where it is scavenged for usable parts and then abandoned, polluting soil and groundwater with toxic metals.China has probably already overtaken the US as the world's leading emitter of CO2 and the country's ecosystems are displaying climate change's consequences: Arid northern China is drying out, the wet south is seeing more and more flooding, and, according to a June 2007 Greenpeace report, 80 percent of the Himalayan glaciers that feed Asia's mightiest rivers could disappear by 2035. Such a development would jeopardize hundreds of millions of people who depend on the rivers for their livelihood.
On balance though good old America alone is responsible for a quarter of the man-made greenhouse gases pumped into the earth's atmosphere over time, while China's cumulative contribution is still less than a third as much. And even today, China's per capita carbon-dioxide emissions are less than a fifth of America's. Yet China's refusal to curb emissions soon could single-handedly wipe out reductions made elsewhere, crippling the international effort.
So why then did the Chinese emulate the American economic model?
Since the 1980s, Chinese policymakers have gone on foreign-study missions to figure out how developed countries fostered economic growth, buy why did they miss or oversee the obvious, or even did they?……….It would be too easy just to blame it all on as a bad mistake, or is it really just that plain simple?
The other question that could be asked is why did the United States pass up the opportunity it had at the beginning of China's economic transformation to guide it toward sustainability?
We can read a lot of things into these equations, as I’m sure conspiracy theorists could.
The reality now is that we have a massive economic global meltdown which just isn’t going to go away, no matter how much you wish, and at the same time and running parallel to the global meltdown is climate change and Co2.
Of course its just a pure coincidence that worlds governments are dealing with climate change and economic policies at the same time isn’t it.So what's the real deal? , well the real deal is that “Perception” is reality, no matter if true or false.
Is climate change and Co2 real? And Did the Subprime market and Lehman Brothers really cause the global market to meltdown? Yes…………and no...............To think that Subprime/ Lehman were the prime causes would be too simple.
