China's frenetic push to have cities covered in concrete, glass and steel by the 2008 Olympics has created a spending spree unprecedented in human history.
The financial cost will exceed the total of the banking system's non-performing assets. Other costs will be counted in lives and medical care expenditure. As China's leaders look ahead to their 11th Five-Year Programme, they may want to question their priorities for the nation's future.
China is the world's second-largest discharger of greenhouse gases, behind the United States. Beijing has joined the Kyoto Protocol, and has ambitious targets for reducing pollutants. The US has not joined Kyoto and couldn't care less about its emissions. Many hope that Zhongnanhai will not follow the White House's example of disregarding the environment. It would be all too easy a pretext for disregarding what is about to become a catastrophic problem.
The mainland accounts for 8 per cent of the world's crude oil consumption; 10 per cent of its power, 19 per cent of the aluminium, 20 per cent of the copper, 31 per cent of coal and 30 per cent of steel.
Its dependency on energy imports is made worse by its inefficient use of those resources: the mainland's discharge of pollutants per unit of gross domestic product is much higher than that of developed countries.
Mainland China - with one-fifth of the world's population - accounted for only 4 per cent of the world's total GDP in 2004. Yet its energy consumption per unit of GDP is currently seven times higher than Japan, six times that of the United States and 2.8 times that of India.
Economic growth has been driven by the same forces that are pushing up the waste of energy - hyper-investment and the production of steel and cement for construction, as well as other industrial products. For instance, it takes 1.6 tonnes of oil to produce a car on the mainland, but only 0.9 tonnes in the US. Energy efficiency in production must be the starting point for controlling environmental damage.
