Just attended and interesting presentation on globalization and sustainability here. The focus of the talk was on engineers and what they could to improve energy consumption in a global economy but it had a great deal of general globalization content as well. Key takeaways:

• China will pass the US in GDP in 2040
• India will soon outgrow China in population as a result of china’s one-child policy
• World population to exceed 9 billion by end of century
• There is a shortage of coal in China due to the inability to extract it fast enough
• There is some concern over China’s use of nuclear energy because some of the plants are suffering from lack of maintenance
• For every 3 barrels of oil extracted in the world, only 1 barrel is discovered

I also found it interesting at how numbers are viewed. While it is commonplace to compare the amount of energy used per person, a more telling statistic is energy used per GDP. Yes, the US used more energy per person than China but we also produce 3.5 times as much GDP as China per unit of energy used.