WASHINGTON - the Earth lacks the energy, arable land and water to enable populous and fast-growing China and India to attain Western levels of resource consumption, an environmental think tank said in a report on Wednesday.
The Worldwatch Institute said booming China and India, once sleepy backwaters in the world economy, are becoming not only economic powers, but "planetary powers that are shaping the global biosphere" and affecting world economic policies.
The Washington-based institute's "State of the World 2006" report said the economic miracles in China and India masked severe air and water pollution crises in those countries, while demand for resources spurred surging worldwide oil and commodity prices.
"The world's ecological capacity is simply insufficient to satisfy the ambitions of China, India, Japan, Europe and the United States as well as the aspirations of the rest of the world in a sustainable way," said the 244-page report.
If China and India, each with more than a billion people, were to match by 2030 the per capita use of resources of Japan, "together they would require a full planet Earth to meet their needs," it said.
Per capita oil consumption in China and India is, respectively, one-fifteenth and one-thirtieth that of the United States. To attain half of US consumption levels would cause the two countries to use 100 million barrels per day, more than 2005's total daily world consumption of 85 million barrels, it said.
Sketching a similar trajectory for grain consumption, the report says that with their shrinking and environmentally stressed farmland, China and India will buy more grain abroad, driving up prices for consumers worldwide.
The report says the United States - with 4.5 percent of the world's population consuming a vastly out-sized share of world resources - needs to embrace China and India as decision makers in global efforts to pursue sustainable energy.
Efforts to enlist the two Asian giants should include making China and India full members of the Group of Eight industrial nations, bringing China into the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and giving India a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, the report said.
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
