Recently, heaps of attention has been paid to the fact that China leads the world on carbon pollution. While this is true in terms of total pollution output, the average Chinese person has roughly 20% the carbon footprint of your average American person. The only problem is China has more than 1.3 billion people.

China has major ambitions to become the most productive economy on the planet, and this marks one of the reasons why China focuses on developing low carbon industrial solutions. Being green makes businesses more profitable, and also insures that the business can maintain a steady supply of resources without depleting the environment’s ability to replenish those resources. A great example of this would be rice. If you are running a rice company and you do not take excellent care of your farms, then very soon your crop yields will go down and the quality of your rice will decline. You need good and plentiful ingredients to compete in the food marketplace. The more green China becomes, the more fearsome they will become as an economic superpower.

China also has an enormous population that takes up more habitat space each year. This population has placed a burgeoning burden on the ecological habitats of China. You may remember the huge deal made out of the air quality in Beijing prior to the start of the ‘08 Olympic Games. Check out this news story [www.sundancechannel.com] for more info on the environmental considerations China was forced to deal with because of the Olympics.

In recent international summits on climate change, the U.S. has maintained its position that it cannot invest in a low carbon economy until other countries like China and Russia do likewise. The fear is that the U.S. will spend a lot of money adapting to low carbon industrial infrastructures and other large countries who do not spend this money will be more competitive than America. This argument is dangerous to the future of the United States for a few reasons.

You only get one backyard. Regardless of what the rest of the world does, the U.S. controlled portion of the North American Continent will have to supply natural resources like food, water, clean air to the population of the United States. These are necessary services that only a strong, healthy and robust nature can provide. No matter how strong your economy becomes, if the fields are filled with poisonous pesticides, then you will have to spend a lot of money cleaning up that pollution after it has already started to affect your bottom line. With the application of some foresight, you could spend a little money to prevent the pollution problem from becoming critical, thereby shielding your bottom line from jeopardy.

The second problem with the U.S. climate change position of “everybody or nobody” stems from economic reasons. China currently leads the world in the production and exportation of solar panels. They are poised to be the world’s largest producer of wind turbines. China heats up water internationally by controlling two-thirds of the solar water heater industry. China wants to be the world’s most influential and powerful superpower, so you can bet they have some great economic reasons for investing this kind of money into environmentally friendly industries such as the ones listed above. Chinese people, by and large, desperately want to prove that their Communist State rivals all other countries in the world. They would not be pursuing industries like wind energy, solar energy and sustainable water heating if they did not believe that this was the most advantageous economic position to occupy. Is the U.S. willing to let China fulfill the demand for alternative energy industries?

Phelps may have dominated swimming events in the ‘08 Summer Olympics with his large collection of gold medals, but who is winning the gold medal for investing in a healthy planet?

Recently, there have been many murmurs questioning the carbon reducing ability of the biofuel industry. One scientist in particular, Mr. Joe Fargione of The Nature Conservancy, says that statistical research has shown that biofuel production, as it currently exists, produces more carbon pollution than traditional fossil fuels. Keep in mind that this article is in no way an endorsement of the fossil fuel industry. At the end of the article there are some suggestions as to how the biofuel industry can modified to make less impact on the climate.

The two main reasons that biofuels are currently disastrous for the environment have to do with the way in which the alternative fuel source is manufactured.

1. Crops are not being rotated in biofuel farms. Previously, corn farmers would rotate soy bean crops in between harvests of corn. This has been a farming practice since the Renaissance, and helps to insure soil quality improves gradually and requires less fertilization. Previously these corn farms were creating a food stock, and therefore the regulations for food production were in effect; most regulations attempt to insure an edible product as well as mitigate damage to the environment. Producing corn for biofuel is different in that nobody will consume this corn. Since the corn is no longer regulated as a food product, why would you waste money growing a crop of soybeans in between your next harvest of biofuel-bound corn? Instead, it is more financially rewarding to harvest another crop of biofuel and use cheap and semi-toxic fertilizers to insure a large crop of corn. The runoff of toxic, petro-chemically produced fertilizers helps to weaken ecosystems that would otherwise trap carbon in soil, organisms and plants.

2. Converting wild land into a farm with one massive crop of corn releases a huge amount of carbon trapped in soil and wild plants. Joe Fargione says “Let’s say you drain and clear an Indonesian peat bog and replant it with palm oil for biofuel. Over 50 years, the carbon released by the decomposing peat would end up being 420 times greater than the carbon saved by using one year of palm biodiesel. This means that it would take 420 years of using that biofuel to “pay off the debt” of carbon that is released by draining and clearing peatland.” In addition to this, opening up new tracks of agricultural land for nonfood production creates an unsustainable demand on the ecosystem that will accelerate global warming and species extinction.

3. The next problem with biofuel stems from economic supply and demand reasons. Since the aforementioned American farmers are no longer growing soybeans, someone has to step in and grow the product and meet demand. South American farmers have gleefully stepped into this role and are now converting huge tracts of previously wild amazon into soybean farms, hastening the breakdown of these vital ecosystems.

4. Biofuels hold less energy per gallon of fuel, thereby creating more carbon emissions through the transport of the liquid fuel.

Before you black out from the depressing list of problems, remember there is always a new way to look at an old industry. If biofuels were created from cast-off agricultural products and byproducts, then the fuel source would be lowering carbon emissions and bolstering the economy through domestic production of a product. This would limit the amount of production possible at each biofuel distillery, but in the long run would improve the profits of the particular agricultural company because they would lower fuel costs and/or be able to sell excess fuel locally. Intrinsically, there is great value in the production of biofuels, it is just a matter of perfecting the manufacturing process and specifically in harnessing the supplementary energy prospects of intelligent waste management protocols.

Want to read the article this story is based on? Check out the article here [www.nature.org].