The Oil Drum

109 comments on Will the New Year bring Happiness and Prosperity?

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davebygolly on January 1, 2007 - 1:43pm

China is a bomb IMO. (Not the only bomb though.) The leaders are riding a horse they can't get off. Any slackening in the growth rate produces massive unemployment and upheaval. Yet the growth is totally unsustainable every which way. Unlike here, there are elderly Chinese (not even that elderly) who remember what it was like under Mao -- meager, simple, austere, but iron rice bowls, rudimentary universal health care, guaranteed minimal survival. Gone. Once the compensations of growth disappear, watch out.

These vulnerabilities are the reason the Chinese leaders put up with as much bullying from the US as they do, and continue holding a huge pile of rapidly depreciating dollars. Deadly embrace I call it.

Where else to go but coal after oil and gas become scarce? In more pessimistic moments (which stretch out into minutes, days, weeks sometimes) I think there's no hope that we'll avert worst-case scenarios of global warming and environmental devastation. Peak coal would be a blessing if it would but come on time. But it won't -- there's TOO MUCH of it. It seems that little stands in the way of our wrecking the planet.

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mjacobspaj on January 1, 2007 - 3:52pm

Your comment about China not being able to back off its growth trajectory is particularly apropos. The Chinese leadership has convinced hundreds of millions of people (perhaps as many as half a billion people) to leave the farm for a life in the city working at salaried jobs. The arguments used involved freedom, personal development, and a change from calculating wealth in calories eaten per day.

It is highly likely that if the growth stops in China, then unemployment will increase. I doubt that the Chinese leadership will be able to convince people to go quietly back to the farm and count wealth by calories eaten.

It might well be worth the leaderships' life and China's existence as a single country to try.

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LevinK on January 2, 2007 - 11:59am

I wonder... did anybody have to convince you to live in a city, drive a car, use an A/C etc.? Why didn't you instead become a farmer who works heavy almost all manual labour 24/7, just to feed his family? Tough choice I imagine. It surely has taken a lot of propaganda and communist brainwashing to do it.