After watching all the news programs on television each Sunday for a while now, I truly wonder if what we see on television, or in print, is ever really the full truth.

The idea of truth is different to different people, but to me it is facts completely devoid of interpretation. Interpretation is bound to occur to some extent, but good reporting is different from good journalism. One is completely factual, while the other uses facts to arrive at a conclusion that can be easily supported by those facts.

Perhaps the best thing for a person to do is fully immerse oneself into as much fact finding as is possible. This requires a huge commitment in effort as well as time. This is why most of us choose to have the ‘news’ spoon fed so that not much time is needed, and very little thought.

Yesterday, after watching a program on PBS, the following program started without any intervention from me, as I was at the computer, multitasking, as I do much of the time. It concerned itself with concepts in design, and more specifically ‘green’ design. I found myself looking at it more, and the LCD in front of me less, as I heard a few tidbits that probably passed by unnoticed to many of the viewers. Stated was the fact that with the growing boom in China, simply building houses there in the next seven to ten years unabated would consume 70% of the available natural resources of the planet. Pause for a moment to think about that. Nowhere else have I seen this statistic, or heard it on the news. It is one of those things most people would probably not want to know about. (Ignorance is bliss?)

The other facts brought to light by this program were that the government in China realizes how much impact the current boom is affecting the entire world, the government is controlling building there, both by style and amount, and how much work is done to allow as little effect on the ecology of the planet as possible.

While at first this might be consoling, also brought to light was the fact that possibly 25% of the pollution that resides in the air of metropolitan Los Angeles comes from China. This certainly brings the ‘Earth is a small neighborhood’ concept into full relief. How many other problems are caused by the largest population on this planet? Although the program seems to indicate the extreme self control used by the Chinese, the actual numbers of things upset by the growth is staggering. Because the Chinese rely on coal for most of the power generation, no matter how clean the technology, the sheer amounts of pollutants released into the atmosphere are colossal.

The other side of this story seems to be the amassing debt of this country to the Chinese. There seems to be no end to it, nor does the current administration seem to have any plans to do anything to alleviate it. How long will it continue before the Chinese simply say to America that it is time to pay up? What then?

How do we change this? Is it possible that the tipping point has already been reached and that the slow decay of Western civilization has allowed, with out conscious action by them, the Chinese nation to soon become the de facto leader of the entire planet?

[tags]China, Chinese resources, pollution[/tags]