Making poverty history threatens "Earth"?

Below is yet another example of the usual brainless Greenie drivel that treats the amount of available resources as static. Earth's huge fields of bauxite were not a resource until Hall and Heroult discovered how to get aluminium from it. And look at the number of things we now use aluminium for! People CREATE resources. Something is not a resource until people make it available for use and people are always making more and more things available for use. There are now more than 7500 land-based desalination plants worldwide, including the US, Spain and India, that are making fresh water available on a large scale by extracting it from seawater. "Finite" resources are a lie

Earth lacks the water, energy and agricultural land to allow China and India to attain Western living standards, a US think-tank has warned. The Worldwatch Institute said the booming economies of China and India are "planetary powers that are shaping the global biosphere". Its State of the World 2006 report said the two countries' high economic growth hid a reality of severe pollution. It said the planet's resources could not keep pace with such growth. Important choices "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," the report added. It said that if China and India were to consume as much resources per capita as Japan in 2030 "together they would require a full planet Earth to meet their needs", [No mention that China and India might PRODUCE huge resources too] it said.

The institute's report said that in the next few years the choices China and India made could lead to political and economic instability, or they could usher in an age of better stewardship of resources and more efficient technology. The reports said the US - which continues to consume more of the Earth's resources than any other country - needed to cooperate with China and India to help develop more environmentally friendly practices and technologies.

"China and India are positioned to leapfrog today's industrial powers and become world leaders in sustainable energy and agriculture within a decade," Worldwatch Institute president Christopher Flavin said [In his dreams]. "We were encouraged to find that a growing number of opinion leaders in China and India now recognise that the resource-intensive model for economic growth can't work in the 21st Century," he said. China already has a solar-powered heating system which supplies hot water to 35 million homes, while India has pioneered a system bringing clean water from rainfall [Clean water from rainfall! Wow! Who'd have thought of that! I drank plenty of tank water when I was a kid 50 years ago. But treated town water is safer and cheaper], the report said.

From BBC NEWS, 12 January 2006

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