I was reading several different items today that seemed to come together. I'll see if I can make a coherant thought from them.
I was first struck by the statement in a Motley Fool article, These Markets Aren't Emerging, They're Exploding It states:
Meanwhile, China is on the move. Not in the way you think, with its ever-expanding external influence. No, China has 200 million people living comfortably and another 1.1 billion who aren't but would like to be. The result is the greatest migration in the history of humankind. Each month, the major Chinese cities receive enough new inhabitants that they need to build the equivalent of Houston -- infrastructure and all -- to handle them.
I'm not sure of the math; I guess that means 2 million people/month. This article from the BBC from 5/11/2004, The second industrial revolution, uses slightly smaller numbers, but substantiates a huge move:
The biggest mass migration in the history of the world is under way in China, and it is creating what some are calling the second industrial revolution.
A massive building boom unparalleled anywhere is taking place - last year, half of the concrete used in construction around the world was poured into China's cities.
And the demand for these new apartments, office blocks and skyscrapers is coming from China's rural masses - people intent on heading to the cities along the eastern coastline of the country.
"In the next 25 years, 345 million people are going to move from the rural areas into the city areas, which is the biggest mass migration of people ever, anywhere," Guy Hollis, of international real estate agents Jones Lang LaSalle, told BBC World Service's Global Business programme.
The "light came on" for me when I read this quote from teacherken's diary, "Negawatts, not megawatts":
To me, this is the wrong question...
...I mean, yes, you are right, to a degree. The problem is that the efficiency of energy production in the US is such a small part of the issue.
How do we create the right incentives for cleaner electrification of the third world? That's the big question. Because a lot more of the population of the world has little electrification than there are people who live in modern electrical nations. And those nations will electrify as cheaply as possible, because they are poor.
So, the reality is that as nice as making America's power generation cleaner is, it will mean nothing unless we can help spread electrification to the third world at levels half as clean as we are now. This proposal, as good as it is, is nothing more than sticking our finger in the Mississippi River of worldwide pollution.
Clearly, we need to be pushing resources and subsides toward conservation in the developing world, as well as cleaner sources of power. The developing economies do not have to duplicate our own "path to prosperity"; they can (and will) skip steps along the way. Many places are already skipping the step of a fully developed infrastructure of telephone lines, going straight to the cellular network model for most of their territories. In the same way, they may be able to minimize use of incandescent bulbs and go directly to fluorescent bulbs and highly efficient LED lights. These are obviously more expensive initially, but are likely cheaper in the long run for the developing economies than paying for the extra generating capacity, as well as being better from a global warming perspective. We should also be able to help with incentives to go with highly efficient appliances, LED computer monitors instead of CRTs, etc. We need to avoid dumping our older technologies and outmoded appliances in third-world markets, just because they're cheaper.