What lies ahead

This will be a short entry, as I've been on my computer way too much lately.

As I see it, there are two major challenges facing the world in the next few years. One is climate change - or, to be more accurate, the acceptance of the idea that the North American way of living is not sustainable. If the entire planet lived the way we do, human life would not survive. We simply consume too many resources. (And I emphatically say "we" here - I know that my ecological footprint is way too large. At least I don't drive a car.)

The other challenge is how China will integrate into the world. China is a very large nation, with growing economic power. As a consequence, they're starting to pollute more: the Globe had an article yesterday on Linfen, a Chinese city of 4.3 million that is arguably the most toxic city on the planet. China, because it is still developing, is likely to increase its output of greenhouse gases over the next few years: they argue that they should be given the opportunity to improve their economy, even if it means a short-term hit to the environment. (This was the same process that North America went through: as recently as 1948, smog in Pennsylvania was bad enough to kill 19 people in 24 hours.)

Another consequence of the growing power of China is price competition. China has millions and millions of low-wage workers, and more and more manufacturing is being done there, as it is cheaper. How will the world economy adapt to this?

One of the short films shown at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival was a very provocative piece of (what I guess is) propaganda on this very subject, called "Ha Ha Ha America". (You can watch it here, though you will first have to endure a commercial for Axe spray, in which thousands of women in bikinis chase after an Axe-wielding man.) The movie - directed by an American - indulges in very crude stereotyping, to put it mildly, but it gets your attention. For discussions of this movie, you can go to the Internet Movie Database page for it, or the Metafilter discussion page from January 2006.