In "Choking on Growth" in the August 26 New York Times, Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley tell us that China’s tendency to destroy the environment may be out of control and potentially earth shattering.
Environmental woes that might be considered catastrophic in some countries can seem commonplace in China: industrial cities where people rarely see the sun; children killed or sickened by lead poisoning or other types of local pollution; a coastline so swamped by algal red tides that large sections of the ocean no longer sustain marine life....China’s leaders recognize that they must change course....As gloomy as China’s pollution picture looks today, it is set to get significantly worse...
http://www.nytimes.com/...
As China's perhaps irreversible energy-usage trends accelerate, the entire world will be swept up in their consequences to a far greater extent, apparently, than it will be affected by U.S. policies. The single attribute the U.S. may still possess -- underline "may" -- is it's potential flexibility. U.S. environmental policy is arrogant and destructive, and it's response to world crises continues to be imperialism and war. But at least in this nation, with sufficient citizen resolve, these orientations can change With a little "revolution," of the perfectly legal kind enabled by our constitution, the U.S. has the potential to model environmental sanity and become a force for building global community.
Nothing else makes sense. Current U.S. policies have little potential to affect world events significantly, for good or ill. The United States cannot conquer the world nor will it even be able to control its own energy future. The juggernaut trends created by China, and probably India as well, will prevail and engulf us along with all other nations. As people are apprised of these facts, they will rise to the challenges they pose far more vigorously when they perceive their lives and the lives of their children to be at stake than when they perceive people they don't intimately identify with being deprived of the energy they need to stay alive. This may seem a sad, terrible inference but it is accurate.
It is time to educate the public about the consequences of policies that affect people in ways that most genuinely impact upon them. This effort has yet to be embraced by self-styled agents of progressive social change. It is time for new leadership on the Left -- in fact a new kind of leadership.
DW