The Great Green Leap Forward

Energy-Hungry China and India Leapfrog to the Front of the Global Green Building Movement

The green building movement has reached the developing world not a moment too soon for the booming, energy-hungry economies of China and India. With China’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) still surging at nine percent, and India’s nipping at its heels with projected GDP growth of more than eight percent this year, the “Asia Century” is dawning fast. Rapid economic growth rates have also meant that two Asian giants are taking a larger bite out of global energy supplies. China’s demand for oil has doubled since 2000, accounting for 40 percent of the total increase in global demand. India’s energy demand has been increasing by 30 percent annually.
With high oil prices and low domestic supplies, both countries will have to rely on their abundant—and abundantly dirty—coal reserves to meet future demand. China already has the dubious distinction of being number two, after the U.S., in climate-changing carbon emissions, and India is fourth. And that is at comparatively low rates of per-capita consumption by what are still largely rural societies. Once the majority of Indians and Chinese move off the land and start consuming at rates approaching even those of their frugal neighbors in Japan, they will require a full planet Earth to meet their needs alone.

Due to the harsh deprivations imposed by rural life, the average Indian uses just four percent of energy consumed by the typical American. But that’s changing as people flood into cities, pushing urbanization rates in both India and China to over 50 percent within the next generation.

Sunita Narain, a leading voice in India’s growing environmental movement, writes in the forward to WorldWatch Institute’s 2006 State of the World Report, “The Western model of growth India and China wish most feverishly to emulate is intrinsically toxic. It uses huge resources and it generates enormous waste.” The only alternative, according to Narain, is for the developing world to “reinvent the development trajectory.”

Dr. R.K. Pachauri, the current chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, commented in a recent op-ed that with India’s oil consumption expected to double by 2030, “the Indian economy and the expectations of the public are now at a crucial stage which requires some major departures from past practices.”

Political leaders in India have made a major commitment to increase the share of renewable energy by five times to a quarter of the country’s total power needs. China, meanwhile, has adopted a far-sighted new energy law that will direct large investments into developing renewable energy sources.

EMagazine