A message from my son Jan :
Interesting article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120613138379155707.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Spread of Prosperity
Brings Supply Woes;
Slaking China’s Thirst
By JUSTIN LAHART, PATRICK BARTA and ANDREW BATSON
March 24, 2008; Page A1
(See Corrections & Amplifications item below.)
Today the old fears are back.
Although a Malthusian catastrophe is not at hand, the resource constraints foreseen by the Club of Rome are more evident today than at any time since the 1972 publication of the think tank’s famous book, “The Limits of Growth.” Steady increases in the prices for oil, wheat, copper and other commodities — some of which have set record highs this month — are signs of a lasting shift in demand as yet unmatched by rising supply.
As the world grows more populous — the United Nations projects eight billion people by 2025, up from 6.6 billion today — it also is growing more prosperous. The average person is consuming more food, water, metal and power. Growing numbers of China’s 1.3 billion people and India’s 1.1 billion are stepping up to the middle class, adopting the high-protein diets, gasoline-fueled transport and electric gadgets that developed nations enjoy.
The result is that demand for resources has soared. If supplies don’t keep pace, prices are likely to climb further, economic growth in rich and poor nations alike could suffer, and some fear violent conflicts could ensue.
Some of the resources now in great demand have no substitutes. In the 18th century, England responded to dwindling timber supplies by shifting to abundant coal. But there can be no such replacement for arable land and fresh water.
The need to curb global warming limits the usefulness of some resources — coal, for one, which emits greenhouse gases that most scientists say contribute to climate change. Soaring food consumption stresses the existing stock of arable land and fresh water.
“We’re living in an era where the technologies that have empowered high living standards and 80-year life expectancies in the rich world are now for almost everybody,” says economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, which focuses on sustainable development with an emphasis on the world’s poor. “What this means is that not only do we have a very large amount of economic activity right now, but we have pent-up potential for vast increases [in economic activity] as well.” The world cannot sustain that level of growth, he contends, without new technologies.
Americans already are grappling with higher energy and food prices. Although crude prices have dropped in recent days, there’s a growing consensus among policy makers and industry executives that this isn’t just a temporary surge in prices. Some of these experts, but not all of them, foresee a long-term upward shift in prices for oil and other commodities.
Today’s dire predictions could prove just as misguided as yesteryear’s.
“Clearly we’ll have more and more problems, as more and more [people] are going to be richer and richer, using more and more stuff,” says Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician who argues that the global-warming problem is overblown. “But smartness will outweigh the extra resource use.”
Some constraints might disappear with greater global cooperation. Where some countries face scarcity, others have bountiful supplies of resources. New seed varieties and better irrigation techniques could open up arid regions to cultivation that today are only suitable as hardscrabble pasture; technological breakthroughs, like cheaper desalination or efficient ways to transmit electricity from unpopulated areas rich with sunlight or wind, could brighten the outlook.
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