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 00002 00002	                    THE CHINESE CAN SO HAVE CARS
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                    THE CHINESE CAN SO HAVE CARS


                          by John McCarthy


	Pirages and Ehrlich declare it impossible  that  the  Chinese
will ever achieve the same ratio of cars to people as the U.S. has at
present. They also argue that since each American uses one twenty-two
times  the  energy  per  capita,  raising  the  Chinese level to the
American would double the environmental impact  of  humanity.    They
don't  say  this  is  bad,  but  one  can  assume  they  consider  it
unacceptable.

	It seems to me very likely that the Chinese  will  eventually
achieve both the rate of automobile use and the rate of energy use of
present day America and that this will be good for them and that  the
side  effects  will not be harmful to themselves or anyone else.   On
the level of detail of the Pirages and Ehrlich article, this  is  all
that need be said; an unsupported opinion in an article needs only an
unsupported opinion as a reply.  However,  Ehrlich  and  others  have
given  more  details  elsewhere,  so  here  is a reply to some of the
points they might have made.

	First, a substitute  for  gasoline  from  petroleum  must  be
found; even present consumption rates cannot continue long.   Battery
cars might work, but this is still not clear in spite of considerable
development  effort.   Several  authors  have  proposed to use liquid
hydrogen produced by electrolyzing water as a motor fuel.   It  works
fine  even  in  present  engines,  but  it  promises  to  be somewhat
dangerous to handle, perhaps more dangerous than gasoline.  I predict
that  we  and the Chinese will accept the accidents rather than forgo
personal transportation.  Of course, the electricity  for  extracting
the  hydrogen would have to be found, and this can come from breeder reactors
for which the supply of raw materials will last for 1000 years.   (It
would be insulting to the technological ability of our descendants to
plan beyond that).  Operating these reactors will produce  local  hot
spots in the water along the Chinese coast, but they will accept that
price as will we.

	Consider mineral resources on which the U.S. now  spends  two
percent  of  its  GNP.  We import high grade iron ore because this is
cheaper than using lower grade ores, but when we have to, we can  use
iron  at  its  5 percent abundance in the earth's crust; minerals may
then cost 4 perecent of our GNP.  Copper may become genuinely  short.
If  it  were  as  expensive as gold, we would substitute aluminum for
almost all its uses.   The worst consequence of this  would  be  that
electric  motors  and  transformers  would  be bulkier since aluminum
conducts electricity worse than copper.   Before  that,  however,  we
will  mine  AT&T's  underground  cables and replace them by aluminum.
There are many more resource problems than  this,  and  many  of  the
solutions  are  not  well understood, but the arguments that they are
unsolvable are unconvincing, and how to solve  the  problems  of  the
next hundred years is much better understood than the problems of the
last hundred years were understood a hundred years ago. Incidentally,
the   cartoon  that  accompanied  the  article  showing  the  Chinese
landscape totally covered with cars was fraudulent; when the  Chinese
have as many cars per capita as the United States, they will have 120
cars per square mile which is half the present  car  density  of  New
Jersey.

	The  question of whether the Chinese can eventually have cars
is only a particular case of the  general  question  of  whether  the
world  can support its future population at a high standard of living
even granted that the population can be stabilized at a few times its
present  level.    The conventional view until recently was that even
several times the present population can have at  least  the  present
U.S.  standard of living.  After considerable study of statistics and
technology, I have remained convinced that the conventional  view  is
right  and  that slow development of the poor countries is one of our
main problems.  Another is the timely development of a substitute for
petroleum   as   a   vehicle   fuel.   There  are  several  plausible
alternatives but not enough well supported projects.

	On the other hand, if the increasingly  popular  gloomy  view
that  Ehrlich  proposes  is correct, then the main problem is sharing
and not development.  In that case, it should be pointed out that the
main  resource  of  which  the  U.S.  has more than its share is good
agricultural land, and the quickest way to share  that  would  be  to
repeal the U.S. laws restricting immigration.  In my opinion, if this
were done, the world standard of living would rise  sharply,  because
the  American  people  would  really  have to scramble to prevent our
standard of living from decreasing.  In the end, it would be good for
us.