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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.