Gwynne Dyer: China's affluence its worst enemy

It's exactly the sort of document that an American think-tank would have produced in the year 1900, if they had had think-tanks in 1900.

This time it's the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the leading research institute in the world's most populous country, and the document is called China Modernisation Report 2006.

That imaginary American think-tank of a century ago would certainly have predicted extensive urbanisation and far higher incomes in the United States by 1950, because those trends were already well established at the time.

It might not have forecast that half the American population would own cars by 1950, or that tens of millions of Americans could afford to travel overseas by then - but a bold forecaster might have done so.

And when it all came true, nothing terrible happened.

This time the predictions won't come true, because terrible things will start to happen long before 2050. This is deeply unfair, because all China wants for its citizens is the same lifestyle that most Western countries had achieved by 1950.

They got away with it because they were the first countries to industrialise, but China won't because it is so big and because it has come so late to the game.

The report glows with enthusiasm for the predicted rise in Chinese incomes (tenfold by 2050, to $1300 a month), for the 500 million peasants who will move to the cities, for the 600 million city-dwellers who will move into hi-tech suburban homes.

Half China's people will own cars and be able to afford overseas travel, the report predicts. But I don't think so.

The Chinese people deserve prosperity and they have waited too long for it, but they cannot have it in the classic Western style.

Take the cars. Within a decade, China will be the second-largest car manufacturer on the planet - but for half the Chinese population to own cars, the world's total stock of vehicles must almost double. For half of Indians, Brazilians and Russians to own cars the planet's car numbers must triple.

It doesn't work at the local level (nine of the world's 10 most polluted cities are already in China), and it doesn't work at the global level.

At the beginning of World War II the world had two billion people, of whom about 25 per cent lived in industrialised countries - but few of them had cars, ran air-conditioners, or travelled.

Forty years later there were four billion people.

Those who lived in fully industrialised societies by now consumed far more energy and produced far more waste, because a "modern" lifestyle now included cars, meat in most meals, electrical appliances galore and, for many people, foreign travel, although they were still only 25 per cent of the population. Total human pressure on the environment? Up fivefold or sixfold in 40 years.

Now we have six and a half billion people, and we are still running at 25 per cent of the human race living in developed countries, so the pressure on the environment is 10 times that of 1940.

But the predicted development of China by 2050 (and the comparable growth of India, Brazil and Russia) will raise the share of the human race living in high-consumption industrial economies to more than half the global population - which will then exceed eight billion. Total human pressure on the environment could well be 25 times higher in a single century.

It's China's turn, and it's monstrously unfair that it cannot just follow the same development path that Britain carved in the late 1800s, and all the rest of the West followed in the 1900s.

But it can't. You cannot get away with that style of development any more when the world is as damaged as it is now.

The most frightening map I've ever seen is in James Lovelock's book Revenge of Gaia. It shows what proportion of the globe would remain suitable for agriculture if the average temperature went up by 5C.

None of China would support more than desert-population densities, except Manchuria. None of India makes it either, except the Himalayan foothills, and none of the United States except the Pacific Northwest.

That is a completely unacceptable outcome of headlong "modernisation" in the old style, so the China Modernisation Report 2006 is just a fantasy.

Somewhere between now and the future it envisages for 2050, the negative consequences of continuing down the present path will become so large and undeniable that the present development pattern will be abandoned.

It may not be abandoned soon enough to avoid terrible consequences for China and the world, but the day will never arrive when half China's population owns cars.

On the other hand, the day must arrive when the people of China, India, Brazil and Indonesia live as well as Americans, or else there will be hell to pay.

So the day may well arrive when more than half of all Americans don't own cars either. The future, as usual, is not going to be like the present.