China's appetite outstripping America's.

China's surging economy is placing enormous pressure on the Earth's natural systems and resources, note Lester R. Brown and Christopher Flavin of the Worldwatch Institute, Washington, D.C. In the consumption of grain, meat, fertilizer, steel, ad coal, China already has passed the U.S. to lead the world. In use of oil and emissions of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas, it is catching up fast.

Although the U.S. still leads the world in consumption of many resources and is far ahead of China in per capita terms for most resources, China's economy has expanded by two-thirds since 1990 and its use of resources is growing apace. Multiplying even modest consumption levels by a population of 1,200,000,000 people -- more than the U.S. Europe, and Russia combined -- could have a potentially decisive effect on the global environment.

"If China attempts to replicate the consumer economy pioneered in the United States, it will become clear that the U.S. economic model is not environmentally sustainable," indicate Brown and Flavin. "If the average Chinese consumed as much grain and oil per person as an American does, prices of both commodities would soar, leading to unprecedented climate instability."

Using purchaing power partly to measure output, China's 1995 gross national product of just over three trillion dollars exceeded Japan's 2.5 trillion and trailed only the U.S. output of 6.7 trillion. If the Chinese economy continues to double every eight years, the pace it has maintained since 1980, it will overtake American's by 2010.

For several decades, many have observed that the U.S. consumes one-third or more of the Earth's natural resources, but this is changing. Today, China's grain consumption is nearly double that of the U.S., and consumption of meat, mostly pork, is more than twice as much.

In steel production, a traditional indicator of industrialization, China has overtaken the U.S., averaging 92,000,000 tons of steel output per year, 1,000,000 more than America. In computerization, perhaps a more relevant indicator for today's information economy, there is to contest. The U.S. has 71,000,000 computers...