Reference: China's growth could exceed planet's resources, Bangkok Post, September 30, 2009

In the good old days the European races consumed all the resources of the planet and lived well and the rest of the world cooperated by staying poor and supplying resources and energy to fuel European wealth. This arrangement is now changing. About 3 billion Asians in China, South Asia, and Southeast Asia are undergoing rapid economic growth with steeply rising income and consumption - particularly the consumption of minerals and fossil fuels - to the point that it now seems that they aspire to live like Europeans. That is a scary prospect for the rich nations (China's growth could exceed planet's resources, Bangkok Post, September 30, 2009) because it implies competition for scarce resources with a population many times their own, living at the same standard of living and therefore consuming immense amounts of energy and resources. From their perspective, this scenario is intolerable and cannot be allowed to happen. Initial pleas to the Asians that they must not all drive cars, buy refrigerators, and live in heated and air-conditioned homes, that they must go back to their quaint ways and ride bicycles, have not had any success in stemming the Asian economic onslaught. That is why I believe the Europeans need something like a global warming Armageddon. Armed with that scenario, they can now tell the teeming Asian multitudes that they can't all live like the Europeans do because that would overload the planet somehow and that overload would destroy them. That, I believe, is the genesis of the fossil fuels to Armageddon connection by way of carbon dioxide and global warming.

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand