American dream not for you

Gwynne Dyer has bad news for China and three quarters of the world's population.

Why China won't sustain its growth rate

Now we have six-and-a-half billion people and still only a quarter of us live in developed countries, so the pressure on the environment is around 10 times what it was in 1940.

But the predicted development of China by 2050 (and similar growth of India, Brazil and Russia) will raise the share of the human race living in high-consumption industrial economies to over half the global population -- which will exceed eight billion by that time. Total human pressure on the environment: perhaps 25 times higher in a century.

It's China's turn and it's monstrously unfair that it can't just follow the development path Britain carved in the late 1800s and the rest of the West followed in the1900s. But it can't. Read more