Now that China is set to eclipse the US in energy, food, and resource consumption with the inevitable huge increases in global warming, capitalists are suddenly getting real interested in being green. Y’see, not only will China coming online big time spike global warming, if you do the math, at the current piggish comsumption levels, there simply won’t be enough to go around. (emphasis added.)
From the latest Viridian Design newsletter, #469.
Have you noticed America’s “national heat wave” this week? It’s actually a global heat wave, but Americans have become too nationalistic to notice.
Some people don’t believe that big business is seriously worried about climate change.
Goldman Sachs.
The entire G-8 Summit, except for, you know, George:Why is business getting worried? Because the Chinese are holding the planet’s feet to the fire. If it were a matter of reforming themselves, they wouldn’t be so eager, but the Chinese are changing the planet’s growth curves at calamitous speed. With the Chinese at the front table, the world simply can’t live in the way the G-8 lived in the 20th century. It isn’t physically possible and won’t go on. To kill the planet while you are getting rich == that’s one thing. But to kill the planet while the *Chinese* are getting rich? That just doesn’t stand to reason!
There are two ways out of this conundrum: a Jared Diamond-style global collapse, or a radically new world industrial where even the likes of Wal-Mart are cybergreen. And given that Wal-Mart is a major Chinese importer, Wal-Mart is getting all interested.