Our intricate, complex global financial network can be likened to the invisible trails of chemical signals that ants lay down as they manage the supply chains leading to their nest.  From up in space, as Kenneth Boulding commented, we can only see our globe by its broad features – deserts, forests and cities, and with a telescope, maybe people moving about…like ants.  We cannot hear what they say, or understand when they transact in money.  But there are bulk movements of resources – lines of tankers from the Persian Gulf, long trains of coal out of Shanxi China, and giant container ships shuttling in and out of European harbors.  This physical impressive industriousness is the manifest obverse of the abstract contractual relationships between traders.  And all this is underpinned by the finance system – letters of credit, e-pay, and the tiers of loan commitments.  It is so complicated and no single mind can imagine the details, but just like an ant community, it is self-organizing and can adjust as conditions at the margins undergo change.

When Lehman Bros defaulted on 18 September 2008, the Wall St-driven US Government had to step in and assure the banking industry that all else would be kept in place and that business could carry on.  Otherwise, as Andrew Shaw of Bank of China International observed, “planes would stop flying” because the aviation industry needs insurance guarantees.  If the complex financial system does collapse, it will not just be the same day stoppage of planes, the same month stoppage of shipping, but around the globe, the poorest or people living on the edges of forests and grasslands will be pushed further to take from the environment, and with a few years, destruction would be observed from space.  In every human settlement, environment issues would seem too troublesome and air and water would clog with pollutions.  The blue green Earth would not be pretty from space, and be hell on earth.

Currently the media is saturated with warnings of a possible financial collapse, perhaps triggered by Greece defaulting in sovereign debt, with follow-on to Europe and the world.  Portugal, Ireland and many other nations are burdened with unsustainable debt.  Washington is threatened with being unable to pay its public servants.  Ordinary citizens may grow immune to these stories, as they do with chronic news of wars in strange far-off countries.  Ordinary citizens may have no concept of America’s $14.3 trillion dollar debt ceiling – what would that look like in cash?  At the same time media business stories promote news of a “recovery”, “turnaround” and “bouncing back” for firms and economies.  And in the streets in China, people have never had it so good.  From iron rice bowl, to iPad.  Ironically, while Chinese may feel the least pain of the Global Financial Crisis, there is a new wave of fresh thinking here by scholars and strategists on how development can be truly scientific.  What has gone wrong and where could it lead?

New IMF chief Christine Lagarde warns of the worst scenario, when no one trusts anyone to loan money.  Mid-2011 may be a milestone in history and time to take stock before the worst scenario actually happens.  What we have increasingly come to overlook is the role of money in our real economy and society.  Money is a human invention based on trust that a $100 paper bill or electronic signal represents real wealth somewhere.  Money as a representation of power to buy whatever we want has become so ingrained in thinking that we forget the obvious.  Of course it may be only paper but it represents buying power.  People kill for money, “money never sleeps”, money speaks all languages and makes the world go round.  But there is something more we need to retrace and rethink.

The founder of economics, Adam Smith in his 1776 Wealth of Nations explained money as a handy shortcut for when a hunter with a beaver wants to trade with another hunter for 2 deer.  2 pounds for the beaver and one pound for the deer.  Money means you don’t have to cut animals up, and it is easier to carry and store.  Fast forward 200 years and we find Michael Milken “making” hundreds of millions of dollars by leveraging junk bonds against possible future returns.  There were no animal carcasses to back up the money and Milken went to jail, but the idea excited other dreams.  As America’s thirty boom years (after and because of WWII) came to a plateau of physical limits, politicians from Reagan onwards were elected on promises that there was bound to be more of the same.  Creativity in “financial products” in a deliberately deregulated environment took off, with only the brazen of bubbles (World.com, Enron, Pamalat, Madoff) ending in jail terms.

Current world politicians become instant losers when they mention constituents may be living beyond their physical means.  The Greek government is wincing under incensed popular protests even as they bend over backwards for another gasp of borrowed injection.  The French did not like being told not to retire at 60.  Obama swept in with a promise of change and then kept Larry Summers on to manage financial fairlytales.  When the whole Wall Street façade cracked wide on 18 September 2008, Treasurer Hank Paulson strode to the White House microphone and pleaded he “had been dealt a hand” that went back before his time, not mentioning that time was when he was head of JP Morgan, avariciously rewarding himself and cronies while practicing killing fields on genuine investors suckered into toxic loans.

Let’s naïvely ask the emperor the naked truth:  In such crises, why are holes of hundreds of billions of dollars papered over with a new trillion dollars made up out of thin air?  Why call in financial wizards who stuffed up the market while stuffing their pockets to provide solutions… like print more money.  In the US, the first announced $800 billion was cavalier and no one asked where from.  A year later another $600 billion, this time euphemised as “quantitative easing”.  The Eurozone has been a little more rational, with the pragmatic Germans trying to get the peripheral states to toe the line.  China has been supportive, not least because it wants a coherent European market.

Any good government tries to act rationally, and after the chaos of the first half of the 1900’s, ridden with rampant corruption, starvation, wars and hyperinflation, the Chinese have been frugal in their recent 30 years of boom, and are unsettled at seeing their foreign currency savings watered down.  As a nation Chinese can be pragmatic.  David Bonovia commented that if Chinese hear about a pie in the sky, they try to figure how to get it down to eat it.  The deregulation on Wall Street beginning in the seventies and the mushrooming of derivatives were seen to be unhinged from the reality of commodities and manufactures that the Chinese economy measured itself by.  Even as Chinese policy moved towards a careful opening up of markets, there were researchers pioneering Material Flow Analysis that checked the physics of ores to ingots, panels to manufactures, and even to rubbish and recycling.  If they had spent 10 minutes on Enron they would know there was no gas in the pipes.

There are now dozens of centers around China where pragmatic researchers take engineering to a new level of economic accounting, and then let conventional economists and financial experts have their say once the scientific facts are in place.  In this way, it is difficult to conjure financial bluffing.  In a physical economy, the question must be answered: where in the real world, will cash flow be physically sourced?  At Tsinghua University Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Professor Shi Lei and his postgraduates track the full cycles of the aluminium and steel industries, and find how they can succeed in symbiotic relationships in well planned industrial parks to make use of all material and energy and minimum loss.  Both PekingUniversity and BeijingNormalUniversity have teams of scientists in the new field of usable energy analysis which can evaluate all matter and energy in the one universal physical unit, and shows up inefficiencies and downright errors in the processes many enterprises practice.  Professor Chen Guoqian, Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science at PekingUniversity has calculated the total usable energy of the Chinese economy and can show how it fits into the global economy.  The economies now known to be in serious trouble could be identified long ago as unsustainable, and their problems pinpointed rather than hidden in financial webs of debt.

A refreshing approach is taken by Professor Chen Ping of FudanUniversity.  At a think tank forum recently at TsinghuaUniversity he presented on “Equilibrium Illusion, Economic Complexity” and critiqued the frozen window snapshot of an economy that conventional economics provides.  Professor Chen is anything but conventional – a protégé of Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Laureate, under whom he studied 20 years.  Prigogine’s wide ranging mind soared from theoretical global thermodynamics down to a fascination with the social “economy” of an ant community and wondered if the intense industriousness of human society could be objectively observed without being privy to human languages and financial accounts.  Ants don’t use money.  Their capital wealth is an integrated physical infrastructure unseen underground linked by a surface supply chain network of chemical signals intelligently laid down in unquestionable integrity and commitment.  We see the lines of ants, we see them carrying goods, we see them conducting all kinds of services, including construction, exploration and defense.  Their intelligent logical behavior is grounded on the capital of stored information and commitments in their carefully built up chemical network of interconnecting lines and nodes.  Very much like the network of information, storage and commitments we call our financial system.

To wonder what a breakdown of global financial network of trust might look like in physical terms, it would be analogous to taking out a section of the ant’s signal trails.  It would definitely bring that entire supply chain to a halt. No oil, other resources or manufactures.  Like the ants there would be frenzied attempts to patch up or explore anew.  If it was very bad and the breakdown had a domino affect, development as we know it would be set back decades, and even bring on a collapse of civilization.  Humans and ants are both resilient, but if we are wiser than the ants we should appreciate before hand what the remote and abstract threat of financial breakdown means in physical terms.

水循环是一个常见的，浅显的自然现象。水蒸发后，水蒸气由风抬升，飞过高山，然而冷却，压缩，降水，流回再进入另一个循环。

地球每转动24小时就有14万亿吨的水被抬升到大气之中，其中约20%被降回我们生活的陆地上。位置、时机和温度是由我们现在开始了解的多个因素所决定的，其结果解释了最近奇怪的天气状况，警示我们地球变暖。

世界气象组织将反常天气定义为每25年或者更长时间内才发生一次的天气。在过去数年间，灾难性天气频繁登上世界各国和中国报纸的头条，如中国南方出现罕见的暴风雪，北方出现一个世纪以来最严重的干旱等。

现在是时候用崭新的现代视角来观察不可思议的水循环，分析世界的山地、河流和天空的观测数据，理解人类究竟正在怎样影响地球。

海洋表面“温和的烹饪”

光子以每秒30万公里行驶，以光子形式的电磁力被圆盘形的地球所拦截，拥有每秒162000万亿焦耳（162 petawatts）的能量。其中，约有一半的能量到达地表，一半加热了海洋和湖泊的水面，这能量足以产生蒸发作用。这一自然现象规模之庞大使人受到启发而仔细思考。例如160年前，詹姆斯.焦耳（James Joule）所发现的基础物理学表明，1卡路里的热量可以将1立方厘米的水加热1度。（国际标准单位中，4.148焦耳等于1卡路里）当地球缓慢地以每小时1000公里的速度转动时，在水表面产生温和的“烹饪效应”，一定程度上将水抬升到数公里的天空中。如果是一立方米的水，每天就被抬升24公里。

来自太阳的热量是经过大气过滤的。干洁大气有一种低抑制因子，水汽越重，到达地球表面的能量越少。其他气体也折射和反射光子，因而削弱了能量，加热了地表水。但这种效应不被经常讨论，在评论全球水循环如何对我们产生影响前，我们需要确切地阐述被我们认为是理所当然的基本自然功能。

我们应该感谢地球的两项活动，假定我们不打算改变它们，即使我们珍惜它们恒久不变的状态，而气候变化也可能将它们剥离。地球在真空中以每小时10多万公里的速度疾驰（假定其季节变化）并以每小时超过1000公里的速度转动，为我们降温和供暖，并将部分动力传递给转动着的海洋和大气。现在，前景光明的生态信息学界启发了我们对海洋和气流模式的认识。

就像空气动力学工程师在一个风洞中跟踪汽车周围的空气分子流一样，在模糊条件下，科学家团队能界定各种风型常规流向何处，并能跟踪最近在温暖的中低纬度地区出现暴风雪的某些极端反常天气（这让全球变暖的否认者幸灾乐祸）。这些新的反常风型也导致农民所依赖的季节性降水完全混乱。

这方面，中国走在新研究领域的前列，在开拓科学发展的国家政策激励下认识新的研究问题。水是不能被生产但也不会消失，只要人类简单地从水的自然循环中取用，然后再还回自然就能达到平衡。然而，用水最好能有个限度，比如，中国年度GDP的计划用水量限制在6700亿立方米。

物质流分析是一种相似的方法，由于水是一种市场化商品，就像棉花和铝，它的价格自然由供给和需求决定。水也有“生命周期”，就像铁，从自然界提取、冶炼、加工后配送到工厂，制成的产品进入千家万户，最后有的产品能再回收，有的则被废弃。北京师范大学和北京大学两位教授率领的一个团队正在尝试一种可能带有意义深远的革命性方法，即使用《火用》的概念作为统一资源核算口径，既包括质还包括量。

北极风“跳出城墙”吹向南方

过去的两年，北半球流体流动的一项引人注目的新现象已得到揭示。以前，北极上空的大气冷而密，形成的极涡非常紧，它几乎没干扰或中断海洋和墨西哥湾暖流的大气，墨西哥湾暖流是巨大的热量传递纽带，从赤道北部和大西洋北部一直到美国东北部、欧洲，太平洋北部，北美北部地区，乃至日本、朝鲜和中国北方地区。

全球变暖正在两极地区发生是毋庸置疑的，自从1979年卫星照片记录出现以来，北冰洋30%的冰面消失了。过去，冰面能反射太阳光，现在，由于水吸收太阳光，气候变暖则加速了。过去冷而紧密的极涡现在不再那么紧密，向外扩大延伸与墨西哥湾暖流相撞，由此带给地区史无前例的暴风雪，加重了季风影响地区的干旱和多雨等极端天气。

多数情况的降水是一种只在当地的简单地形循环，陆地风将云吹向山地，凝结，降水之后流回大海。世界最高年年降水量和最高降雨量记录都是这个循环形成的。当然，情况也在变化，人们应该研究如何帮助农民规划种植进度，农民应该种什么、他们能多大程度依赖水库和水的输送渠道。而农田的水资源配置、贮存和输送的规划和执行将需要更多的科学支持。即使不谈农业的例子，随着水循环的改变，我们将需要重新考虑正在经受急剧气候变化的城市的未来。例如，工业发展正‘‘滥用’’经过多年变化达成的全球生态系统的平衡，全球生态系统已经发生巨大改变，而零增长的工业扩张（不可能的事）还将影响地球已遭受严重影响的水循环。也许在未来的冬天，暴风雪、洪水和干旱将发生在过去没有经历过这些恶劣天气的地方。因此，现在开始储备会是件明智的事。

Kids learn about the water cycle in middle school – water evaporates, uplifted by wind over mountains, cools, condenses, rains, and flows back down for another cycle. Beautiful and true. If we did not have our mind on other things in those puberty years we may have thought about it more and understand what it now means to our lives now.

14,000,000,000,000 tons of water are lifted into the air each 24 hour rotation of the Earth, and about 20% is dumped back on where we live, on the land. The location, timing, and at what temperature are decided by factors we are now beginning to understand and the results explain recent weird weather and warn us on global warming.

The World Meteorological Organization defines abnormal weather as that which occurs only once in every 25 years or more. In the last few years, disastrous weather has been frequent headlines around the world and certainly in China, with freak blizzards in southern China and the worst drought in a century in north China. It is time to take a modern, fresh look at the miraculous water cycle, analyse the buildings-full of data now monitored around the world on mountains and rivers and in the sky, and understand what on Earth humans are doing to impact on it.

“Gentle cooking” of the oceans’ surface

The electromagnetic forces in the form of photons traveling at 300,000 km per second that the disc shape of the Earth intercepts have an energy of 162,000,000,000,000,000 joules per second (162 petawatts). About half that reaches the Earth’s surface, and half of that warms the water surfaces of the oceans and lakes sufficient for evaporation. It is enlightening to reflect on the gigantic scale of this natural phenomenon. Basic physics explored by James Joule 160 years ago demonstrates that 1 calorie of heat can warm 1 cubic centimeter of water by 1 degree. In Standard International units we now use the unit of energy, joule, of which 4.148 equal a calorie. We have personal experience of water in the stove and observe it evaporating. As the Earth rotates “slowly” at over 1,000 kph, the photons, not like lasers, but as random very high speed jostling through the molecules of oxygen and nitrogen in the air (which explains where half the energy goes – bounced back and reflected into space or transmitted to warm the atmosphere), have a gentle “cooking effect” on surface water, to the extent of lifting the water several kilometers into the sky. If it was a cube of water it would have sides of 24 kilometers lifted each day.

The amount of heat applied from the sun is filtered by the atmosphere. Clean dry air has a low inhibiting factor and with heavy water vapor less energy reaches the Earths surface. Other gases also refract and reflect photons debilitating their power to heat surface water. This effect is not commonly discussed, compared with the volumes of scientific and common discussions on the second stage, return trip – how the Green House Gases trap heat that decades before industrial pollution were reflected back into space. Before we comment on how we might be impacted on by the global water cycle, we need to enunciate its fundamental natural functions which we have taken for granted.

There are two activities about the Earth that we should acknowledge and assume we are not going to change, even though we need to appreciate their constancy on which climate change may spin off. The Earth is hurtling through a vacuum at over 100,000kph (giving its seasonal change) and rotating at over 1,000kph, cooling and heating us and imparting partial momentum to the swirling oceans and atmosphere. A bright new world of Ecological Informatics now lights up our understanding of the basic ocean and air current patterns.

Just like aerodynamic engineers tracking streams of air molecules around a car in a wind tunnel, teams of scientists can define, within fuzzy limits, where wind patterns normally flow, and can track some radical recent anomalies that seem to turn cause blizzards in warm latitudes (and cause Global Warming deniers to gloat). These new wind pattern anomalies also cause havoc to the seasonal rainfall farmers rely on.

China is at the forefront of new research and understanding through encouragement by the national policy of pioneering new outlooks on Scientific Development. Water is a chemical compound, a molecule of three atoms, and is subject to the principle of Material Balance, a scientific approach applied by Professor Ma Zhong, Dean of the Environment Faculty, Renmin University. Water is not produced or consumed, but simply taken out of its natural cycle by humans and then returned. The numbers must add up, and, for example, the volume of water used in the annual GDP of China is planned to be limited to 670,000,000,000 cubic meters. A similar approach, Substance Flow Analysis, is being pioneered by Professor Shi Lei, Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University. Water is a market commodity and just like cotton and aluminium, has a natural price dependent on supply and demand. The “life cycle” of water, can be likened to that of iron, extracted from nature, processed and refined, delivered to industry and households, and then treated for recycling or as “waste”. A brave and radical approach which may revolutionize the science is being trialed by a team led by Professor Chen Bin, Beijing Normal University, and Professor Chen Guoqian, Peking University using the concept of exergy as a unified measure of resource accounting encompassing both matter and energy, and both quantity and quality. Quality of water is increasingly more critical as pollutants make assessments more complex. This new approach was applied to a comprehensive study of the Yellow River and results shed new understanding on water flows through human habitat.

The Arctic wind “leaps the wall” to the south

The past two years have revealed a remarkable new phenomenon in northern hemisphere fluid flows. Previously the air over the Arctic was so cold and dense that it formed a vortex so tight that it barely interfered or interrupted the ocean and air of the Gulf Stream that acts as a giant conveyor of heat from the equator north, north in the Atlantic to the north-eastern US and to Europe, and north in Pacific to northern North America, and Japan, Korea and northern China. There is no doubt that Global Warming is occurring at the poles, with 30% of the ice surface on the Arctic Ocean disappeared since satellite photo records commenced in 1979. The warming is accelerated by the water absorbing sunlight as opposed to the previous ice surface reflecting it. The previous cold dense vortex is not so tight and now spins out wider to clash with the Gulf Steam, bring blizzards where they are unprecedented, and exacerbating the extremes of dry and wet in the monsoon-influenced regions.

Most rainfall is a simple fairly local orographic cycle where onshore winds blow clouds up hills to condense and flow back to the sea. The world’s highest annual rainfalls and most record downpours are attributed to this cycle. Understanding how new human-induced effects on global fluid flows interfere with previously established water cycle patterns will be necessary for success in future living. This is certainly the case for farmers planning their planting schedule, in terms of what they plant, and to what extent they can rely on water reservoirs and delivery channels. More science will need to go into the planning and implementation of water allocation to farmland, in storage and in delivery flows. And beyond the obvious case for agriculture, cities experiencing drastic climate change as the water cycle alters will need to reconsider their future. The sad fact in no need of elaboration is that the rising crescendo of industrial abuse to our finely tuned global ecosystem means it has already changed and zero increase now of industrial expansion (impossible) would still us leave the water cycle significantly affected. In the coming winter there will be blizzards, floods and droughts in places where such severity have not been experienced in the past. It would be wise to take stock now.

数百年前，当企业家初次遇到严重环境问题的时，他们只需简单的转移业务。例如，把钢铁厂从利物浦搬到匹兹堡，然后再移迁到中国。而现在没有新的厂址可供迁移了。当企业家无处可隐藏而不得不面临环境问题的时候，他们最初的反应是勉强的接受这恼人的额外成本。并迅速指出没有遵循这一规则的竞争对手。一旦当期受惠于某些地方或国家的税收政策，他们便不需要遵循因为这一规则而投入环境保护的成本。企业应对环境问题的第二波浪潮是在核心工艺流程不变的情况下促进产品和流程“绿化”，然而当所有阶段的排放都被确认的时候，这种“绿化”是站不住脚的。第三阶段，尚处于萌芽期，在全球环境内对需求以及如何满足这一需求进行全盘考虑。若不这么做就会落入赫尔曼·戴利提出的‘‘向下竞争’’——最肮脏且最便宜的产品能够取得一时的胜利。

作为颂扬企业家精神的第一人，亚当·斯密在1776年曾用屠夫和面包师的例子来说明利己主义能造福社会。积极的市场力量在此被描述为一个古老的苏格兰市场以低成本进行商品供应的良性竞争，事实上，情形并非总是如此。两个世纪以来，一个屠夫在广西南宁长期为一家五星级酒店供应新鲜猪肉，酒店的厨师和顾客都很高兴，因为产品很好，新鲜并且送货及时。但是屠夫是在一条离酒店20分钟路程中心城市“护城河”旁一个贫民窟中临时搭建的台子上屠宰猪，护城河水被屠宰后流出的血水染红，周围邻居们对此心生反感。但若屠夫因此而把屠宰场所移到城外，又将导致他失去生意。

当前，许多企业面临着赚钱的同时不得不破坏环境的两难境地。公共管理者和企业家有必要达成一致，商业计划中不能将环境破坏是为不幸的副作用。中国人民大学环境学院院长马中教授极力提倡新的“绿色项目”：上世纪有过长足发展但目前却是二手老旧的设备等，可通过投资最新的节能、废物最小化技术，使其有更好的机会实现可持续性以及长期的利润回报。中国可进行提前规划，在政策上鼓励和支持这一新概念，甚至禁止一些新区域当前摇摇欲坠的发展模式。

科学界让商业和公共管理逐渐觉悟，热力学定律是产品生产不可违抗的结果。热力学第一定律指出，任何形式的物质和能量是守恒的，除了在核发生器中的原子反应，进入生产流程的每一个原子都会有输出。马中教授师从于物质平衡理论的先驱—艾伦·尼斯，他使我们意识到固体煤中12千克的碳原子和氧结合燃烧，会生成44千克无形气体二氧化碳。目前，温室气体排放议题正置于社会和政治的双重压力下，减少温室气体排放的方式要么是通过封存，要么是提高能效。现在这个简单的科学真理对于经过数世纪只强调货物的产出而无需对该过程中不可避免的废物产出负任何责任的企业家来说，简直是一个痛苦的冲击。

热力学第二定律是一个令企业家更加不快的事实：在物理过程中，一个“孤立系统”的熵必然增加。“孤立”意味着与外界没有任何能量和物质交换，“封闭”意味着物质不能进入或者流出。在经济活动中，真正的“孤立”系统几乎不存在，但如果分析者把一家企业视为一个封闭的系统来进行分析，会发现这个企业对社会产生负效益，除非它使用免费的阳光，风力及水能资源。农业对社会来说是净效益为正，因为其利用了免费的阳光和雨水。数世纪以来，工业产房和生产车间的运营都未计算其中的高熵输出

远在一千多年前，人类就已经把铁矿石冶炼成工具和武器，这是人类文明的一个重要特征。富含铁元素的锭或模型具有高强度和高硬度的晶体结构压的铁元素的晶体结构，而其来源赤铁矿就是极其普通的一种石头。在Jones & Atkins’ Chemistry的熵清单上显示铁和赤铁矿的熵分别为27.28 Joules/oK/mol和87.40 Joules/oK/mol。这是由常识观察得出的科学依据，说明低熵值材料比高熵值材料具有更高价值（分子结构更有序）。企业利用高熵值原材料生产铁和玻璃之类的低熵值产品，以造福于社会并从中获利。可是现在，工业区越来越拥挤，如果我们把这些所有过程纳入系统边界，并将二氧化碳的熵值213.74 Joules/oK/mol计算进去，炼铁行业就是一个熵增过程。在全球范围内，地球是一个封闭系统，没有低熵值材料的进口和高熵值污染的出口。

需要用一种全新的眼光和世界观来看待经济活动。例如进食会使熵增加，但显然我们并不能停止这一行为，而是通过设计良好的排污系统来控制废物。这意味着在运作良好的城市中，用户要为此付费。当前不仅是拥挤工业园区中的企业，甚至偏远地区的发电厂和炼油厂都需要把热力学第一定律和第二定律与他们的商业规划结合起来。尤其要对温室气体进行核算，并通过封存、回收或掩盖等补偿行为进行处理。好的企业通过实施商品和服务的可持续生产，妥善管理其不可避免的“公害”，这将是对我们未来健康的保证。

When entrepreneurs first encountered serious environmental problems a few hundred years ago, they simply moved operations. Steel mills moved from Liverpool to Pittsburg, and then to China. Now there is nowhere new left to go. When entrepreneurs with no where to hide face environmental issues, their initial response is to begrudgingly accept it as a nuisance extra cost. They will be quick to point out any competitors who do not comply. Or do not have to comply because of laxer regulations across some provincial or national border.

A second wave of responses is to promote “greening” of their products and operations but still with the same core processes that are proven but essentially untenable when all emissions are acknowledged. The third phase, now incipient, is to take a holistic view of demand and how it will be met, within the finite closed global environment. To do otherwise, is what Herman Daly has called “the race to the bottom” – who is dirtiest is cheapest and can win for a while.

The first person to extol entrepreneurship, Adam Smith, 1776, used butchers and bakers to exemplify self-interest as benefiting society. The positive market forces described as flowing from healthy competitive supply of good services at low cost in a quaint rustic Scottish market did not always work out that way. Two centuries on, a butcher in Guangxi, Nanning was delivering very fresh pork to a 5 star hotel. The chefs and clientele were very happy. Great product, fresh and on time. But he was slaughtering pigs on a makeshift platform in a shanty slum along the central city’s “stream” 20 minutes from the hotel. His neighbors did not like the rivers of blood in the city’s stream. Moving operations out of town would send him out of business.

Many enterprises now face the dilemma of making lots of money and damaging the environment. It is now necessary for public administrators and business people to agree on business plans that do not treat damaging the environment as an unfortunate side issue. Professor Ma Zhong, Dean of Environment, RenminUniversity, strongly advocates for new greenfield projects, that second hand, old generation equipment not be used, as was the case in much development of last century. By investing in the latest energy-efficient, waste-minimization technologies, there will be better chance of sustainability and long-term profit. China can plan ahead, with public administration encouraging and supporting this notion, and even prohibiting ramshackle development in new zones.

The scientific world has been slow to make the point to commercial businesses and the public administration that the Laws of Thermodynamics have an inviolable result on production. The First Law of Thermodynamics sets out that energy and matter is conserved in any transformation. And except for atomic reactions occurring in nuclear generators, every atom that goes into production process is accountable in the output. Professor Ma Zhong studied under Allen Kneese, the pioneer in Material Balance, which, for example, reminds us that 12 kilograms of carbon atoms in solid coal combust, combining with oxygen, to form 44 kilograms of invisible gaseous carbon dioxide.

There is now social and administrative pressure to manage the gas emissions issues, either by sequestration or improving efficiencies and thus reducing gasses emitted. But there are also incentives to pretend to be doing more than what happens in real science. The simple scientific truth is a painful shock to entrepreneurs after centuries of emphasizing production of “goods” without responsibility for the “bads” inevitably produced.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is an even more unpalatable fact for entrepreneurs: In physics, in an “isolated system” entropy inevitable increases. “Isolated” means neither energy not matter can enter or leave, “closed” means matter cannot enter or leave. In economic activities, the system is almost never really “isolated”, but if an analyst conducted accounting on the enterprise as a “closed” system, that enterprise would be found to be negative net benefit to society, unless it used free sunlight, or forces from wind or water. Agriculture can be net positive because of free sunshine and rain. For centuries factories and industrial mills operated by virtue that much of their high entropy output was not counted.

For over a thousand years the refining of iron ore into iron implements and weapons has been an important feature of civilizations. An ingot or molded shape of the element iron has a hard and strong crystalline structure of value and the hematite it comes from is a fairly common rock. The entropy listings in Jones & Atkins’ Chemistry show iron 27.28Joules/oK/mol and hematite as 87.40 Joules/oK/mol. This is scientific evidence of the common sense observation that low entropy has more value (more ordered in molecular structure) than high entropy material. Enterprises producing low entropy goods like iron and glass from higher entropy raw materials are benefiting society and making a profit. Yet now that industrial zones are getting crowded, if we draw a system boundary around the process, and add the carbon dioxide listed as 213.74 Joules/oK/mol, the iron making industry increases entropy. Globally, the Earth is a closed system with no imports of low entropy materials or exports high entropy waste.

This requires a new totally new look at economic activity – a new World View. Of course eating also increases entropy, and the response has been, in crowded conditions, not to stop eating, but to use well designed sewerage systems to manage the waste. In a well-functioning city users pay for the system. Now enterprises in crowded industrial zones, and even power plants and refineries in remote areas need to incorporate in the design of their business plan the responsible addressing of the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics. Specifically gas emissions need to be accounted for and sequestered, recycled, or covered by compensatory activities. This is not bad news and should not be hidden or shelved as an embarrassment. Good corporations implementing sustainable production of goods and services, and properly managing their inevitable “bads” are where our healthy future will be.

屈于金融家的政府神奇地造出了数万亿美元的赤字/空账。而应付这些赤字/空账的良方之一就是从谷歌地球观察全球经济。

在‘‘谷歌地球’’的帮助下，人们可以找到任何路线，抑或一处度假胜地；你还可以选择任何一个去处，它能为你提供不同于媒体见闻的视角，当然也不同于证券交易分析师和咨询师的建议。‘‘谷歌地球’’建立了一个直观的、基础的平面视野来观察人类所渴望的实体经济。它展现了环境和经济是相同的。具有完整性。它不撒谎，不欺诈，让你来做结论。在你眼前的是实实在在的勤劳付出，无论生活如常还是一团乱麻，明天的太阳照常升起。

显而易见的是第一产业即农田和大型露天矿场等，还有城市中心和交通、供水和供电的基础设施。这就是实体经济，也是美国能被称为富裕国家的理由，相比之下，中国和海地也许就是被称为贫困。与多米尼加共和国相比，海地的土地边境甚至是裸露的，在‘‘谷歌地球’’上，地震如何影响首都的可视化效果是不同于任何其他媒体的。

纵观世界历史，很多时期的文明都承认，土地的劳作者们创造主要财富，后来又加上了作为第二产业的工匠和制造商。在现代西方经济学的早期，在传统中国和日本，商人、贸易商、资金和高利贷的经销商都是‘‘寄生的’’，在著名的圣经中，他们是货币兑换者和收税员。

既然舶来品已经成为金融圈的毒药，那么，这就值得我们对世界实物布局进行实实在在的查证。谷歌的美好第一眼是看不到的，并不引人注目，而随后就能注意到它、理解它。除了显而易见的茂盛绿油油的农田和糟糕的棕色沙漠之外，人类活动的强度也代表了人类成果和财富的集聚。聚焦一个现代城市，谁会拒绝考虑建筑和工程所用的无形软件的贡献呢？如果不是比尔·盖茨及其他‘‘异常’’同事的贡献，我们仍然会依靠着手指来书写，也许就不能为现代设施设计方案、开列清单或执行经营管理计划。因此，我们现在所拥有的实物世界的财富，并不只是在第一产业和第二产业之外的空间中显而易见的：在美观的复杂基础设施和建筑物中，服务交流信息网十分巧妙，并通过竞争实现信息的共享。亚当·斯密（Adam Smith）也许会赞同这个观点：国家财富某种程度上能够在‘‘谷歌地球’’上章显出来。

仅看经济数据就可以给我们留下有悖常理的印象。希腊一个是一个很小的经济体，正在抓住1550亿美元的救助贷款换得几个星期的喘息机会。这些钱摞起来就是一堆1.5km高的百元钞票。美国债台高筑，达14.29万亿美元，还需要2万亿美元来偿付给公务员、退休养老人员和即将到期的财政债券的持有者。这些到顶了？难道经济图表显示的债务就是一个窟窿吗？美国的GDP约14万亿美元，其中农业1500亿美元，汽车4000亿美元，粮食7000亿美元，服装4000亿美元，住房1.6万亿美元。这看起来相当充足了。但别忘了卫生保健（等的就是这个）还有1.5万亿美元。金融和保险是7000亿美元，还有其他服务、咨询，8000亿美元。这些都如何成功变成现实？

‘‘谷歌地球’’的个人使用者，可以放大查看雷曼兄弟前CEO或他的伙伴以及众多幻想家门的豪宅，看看这些由‘‘资助人’’根据经济情况所给予的‘‘理性报酬’’。在惊叹它们的奢华的同时，人们会这样问道：这是谁的成本效益呢？这些世界前50名的豪宅所有者是金融魔法师吗？会等同于400万的农民的价值创造吗？

假如我能与肯尼斯·鲍尔丁（Kenneth Boulding）一起写作他的论文《地球：宇宙飞船》的结语，我会敦促中国政府继续面对富有挑战性的物质现实，管理13亿人民及其环境，并且不用“把债务和环境灾难作为GDP的增长”成本的歪曲真相来衡量社会进步和福利。

One antidote to the multi-trillion dollar deficits/defaults magic coming from governments craven to financiers is to view the global economy according to Google Earth. People use Google Earth to help find a street they are heading for, or check out a vacation spot from the air, and that is very neat. But searching anywhere you choose on Google Earth can give a different perspective to what you hear in the media, and certainly from stock exchange analysts and consultants. Google Earth sets out a visual, primarily superficial view of what now people yearn for as The Real Economy. It shows the environment and the economy as the same thing. It has integrity. It does not lie and cheat and it lets you draw conclusions. The industry, the industriousness, is there before your eyes. And the sun will come up on it tomorrow, either business as usual – or maybe chaos.

Obvious is primary industry – farmlands and big opencut mines, but also the urban centers and infrastructure for transport, water, and power. This is the real economy, and shows American can be called rich, and China, and that Haiti is poor. Even Haiti’s land is denuded compared across the border with the Dominican Republic, and the visualization of how an earthquake can impact on the capital is different from any other medium.

Throughout history in many civilizations, workers of the land are acknowledged as producing primary wealth, and as an afterthought, artisans and manufacturers as a secondary industry. Merchants, traders, and dealers in money and usury were parasitic, in the early days of modern Western economics, in traditional China and Japan, and famously in the Bible’s money changers and tax collectors.

Now that exotic has become toxic in finance circles, it is worth a reality check on the physical layout of our world. There is beauty in Google Earth that first does not meet the eye. Beyond the obvious good green farmlands and bad brown deserts there are intensities of activities that represent concentration of human effort and wealth. Zooming into a modern city, who would dismiss the contribution that intangible software has made to all that architecture and engineering? If it wasn’t for the Bill Gates and fellow geeks we would still be counting longhand on our fingers, and unable to compute the designs and inventories, management and operations plans for modern facilities. So the wealth of the physical world we now have is not just manifest from outer space in primary industry, and in secondary industry: the clever service communication network of information shared and struggled through competition to achieve it is there in beautiful intricate infrastructure and buildings. Adam Smith would agree that the wealth of nations can show up to some extent on Google Earth.

Looking just at economic data gives us a perverse picture. Greece, a tiny economy, is gasping for a breather bailout loan for a few weeks of respite of $155 billion. That’s a stack of $100 bills 1.5km high. America had a debt ceiling of $14.29 trillion and needed another 2 trillion to pay public servants, pensioners and owners of Treasury “securities” coming due. Ceiling? Don’t economic graphs show debt as a hole? America’s calculated GDP is about $14 trillion. Farms $150 billion. Vehicles $400 billion. Food $700 billion. Clothes $400 billion. Housing $1,600 billion. Fair enough. . Health care (wait for this) $1,500 billion. Finance and insurance is $700 billion and other services, consultancies, $800 billion. How does that pan out in reality across the land?

Google Earth allows individuals zooming in on any of the mansions owned by former CEO of Lehman Bros, or his fellow cornucopia visionaries, viewing horizontally, marveling at opulence according to their patrons in economics rationally rewarded, and asking, whose cost-benefit is this? These top 50 mansion owner financial wizard/fakes equate to 4 million large scale farmers? Financial products outclass American agricultural produce by a factor of ten? Google Earth checks reality.

If I was with Kenneth Boulding penning an epilog to his essay, “Spaceship Earth”, I would urge Chinese government to continue getting out there to the challenging physical reality of managing 1.3 billion people and their environment and to measure progress and welfare without the smoke and mirrors that define a debt and an environmental catastrophe as “additions” to GDP.

The overlap of atoms symbolizes bond strengths, with C-H (brown) and O-O (dark blue) totaling 27 electron volts.  On combustion C-O (black) is a very strong bond and there is also H-O (green) totaling 35 eV.  The difference, 8 eV is “released” or made “available” for human economic use such as heating or driving a vehicle or generating electricity.  At the macro level a kilogram of natural gas delivers 20 megajoules of energy.  What we have overlooked in the past but now need to acknowledge is that the bonds we play with are a small subset of the coulombic forces within each set of atoms.  When the bonds are rearranged from 27eV to 35eV, in order to give of 8eV, they are only numerators and they beg denominators.  In context, in the environment, 27/464 has been changed to 35/456.  Entropy has increased, 5.8 to 7.7.

原子间重叠象征了化学键强度，两个分子共有27电子伏特（eV）。在反应后形成新的两个非常强的化学键，共有36eV。二者之差，9eV就是“释放”或产生的“有用能”，用于人类经济活动如加热、驱动汽车或发电。在宏观水平上，我们过去忽视而现在必须承认的是，我们所了解的化学键只是每组原子之间库仑力的子集。

德班会议将是一场‘‘灾难’’。既是对现有的附加件工名单国家，《京都议定书》也不会获得延期，而且也必然不会延伸到其他国家。各国将重回各自为政的局面：增加消耗、加快增长，追求不可持续且可望不可及的发展目标。哥本哈根会议展现了参会代表仍按照200年前工业革命的发展概念来表达观点。坎昆会议，与会者‘‘卑躬屈膝’’地济济一堂，试图靠软弱无力的外交途径为德班会议协商新阶段《京都议定书》建立平台。

世界领袖及其支持者无法勇敢面对科学发展事实，而且，无法将经济发展思想与百折不挠的治理社会环境的科学法则相结合。这将是一项挑战，难度非常大，将招致整体沦陷并演变为异议和‘‘骚动’’。当前，全球金融危机与全球环境重大问题纠缠不清。货币仅仅是商品和服务（原料和能源）的一种表现。德班的领袖们会伪称金融灾难是不同的，与环境问题无关，并为他们自己免除环境责任。后果是，双生危机将归并为货币通货膨胀、对现今稀缺资源的抢取豪夺，以及对明天的环境灾难漠不关心。欧洲领袖指望着用“紧急资助”解救希腊的经济问题，这只是用“筹集资本”或“增加欧元债券”等货币手段提出解决方案。美国人正在呼吁增加工作机会，但误将希望放在印制更多美元之上，更糟糕的是，他们攻击美国环境保护署（EPA）是“就业杀手”，以期改善他们的经济状况。

在过去数十年间，银行家和经济策略家偏执地赞成放松贷款管制并达到了疯狂的程度，最终导致了2008年华尔街巨变，他们还简单地将美国政府和大多数欧盟国家纳入他们的视野锁定范围。面对金融世界的崩溃，之后，他们提倡采用不可思议的大型一揽子经济政策激励措施和更高的债务融资限额——货币就那么轻易地在计算机屏幕上‘‘造’’出来了。抗议者现在已经占据了美国的华尔街和其他富裕国家的金融区，然而却遭受了当众侮辱，因为恰在公司面临破产和员工下岗的时候，关键财务顾问收受肮脏的红利。他们曾游说国会议员，要求立新法，这样他们贪婪的逻辑就不是严格意义的犯罪。奥巴马总统上台执政承诺改变，任用了同一批财务顾问还招募他们的人。

数百年前，美国人两手空空来到新世界，拥有了丰富的资源，不受约束地发展了几个世纪，成为发达国家，而生态服务却受到不可容忍地过度利用。伍迪·格斯（Woody Guthrie）的歌词阐述了这种心理定势。‘‘从加利福利亚，到纽约岛，从红树林，到墨西哥湾，这片大陆为你我而在……’’这种心理定势在前总统乔治·W·布什（George W Bush）的开放的得克萨斯州下得以延续，在加州进步主义共和党人罗纳德·里根（Ronald Regan）推崇下得以兴盛。当下，共和党在党派茶话会上怂恿和鼓动总统候选人米歇尔·巴赫曼（Michele Bachmann）在2012年总统选举中与奥巴马一决胜负，米歇尔坚持认为二氧化碳是自然的，是植物所需要的，是无害的。她使用标语“EPA是就业杀手”来刺激失业者，而忽视了营造绿色经济才能带来更多的就业机会的趋势。美国将派出一个低层次代表团前往德班，不提议不表态。由此可见，“气候变化”这个词只是美国国会的一个宣誓词而已。

哥本哈根会议和坎昆会议

经世界各地筹备会议后，2009年12月在哥本哈根对《联合国气候变化框架公约》第十五次缔约方会议（COP15）的期望是强烈的，大家一致认为失效的负面影响将会在未来数十年间招致灾难。太平洋岛国绘声绘色地描述了当海平面上升后他们的岛屿消失的情景。澳大利亚总理招人厌地操纵会议，将自己标榜为世界的救星，声称，如果联合国要设立监督排放限额的机构，他就是最好人选（这个机构比联合国秘书处具有更高权力）。美国轻率对待，不做出承诺。温家宝总理率领的中国代表团并未受邀参与光荣的联合结论的起草。若事态不是如此严重，那就有趣了，然而，澳大利亚总理意识到了希望的覆灭，打碎了他的宏伟计划，怒骂协调官员，无礼地宣布发誓，他被中国人蒙骗了。具有讽刺意味的是，之前他曾告诉他们，他是中国人的“挚友”。中国人回国后，着手雄心壮志的减排计划；澳大利亚总理回国后，因其副手搅乱了他的碳政策而被免职。欧洲国家为恪守《京都议定书》努力多年，但对最大的排污者还没签定协定而感到沮丧。谴责四起，其中许多是痛苦的醒悟。

2010年底墨西哥的COP16尝试重拾1年前受打击的国家信心，会议带来了一些共识：世界各地200余国家/地区真正地为全球福祉团结在一起。尽管会上没有取得太多实质性的一致意见，但是至少有大批的协议（只有一国，内陆玻利维亚政见不同）可以用来处理德班的艰巨议题。

对“常识”的观察及其提升到现代科学的紧迫性

纵观历史，人类用五官建立对周围环境属性的感知但是，当全球经济触及全球环境范畴时，个人和群体，特别是决策者，都需要使他们的常识与全球现实一致。这是新科学发展观的本质。我们不能再依赖我们的感知去想象利用燃料取热后燃料会化为乌有。虽然，个人可以认为地平线无边无际，某处的彩虹总有‘‘新世界’’，但是，我们现在看到的星球就是一个物质上非常封闭的系统，任何原子都无法离开或进入星球。我们在真空中做轨道运动和旋转，唯一的外部影响是重力和电磁辐射，它们拯救我们免于被湮没。

生物圈仅仅是由陆地、海洋和大气组成的平台和环境，维持植物和包括人类在内的动物的生命。现代科学世界里，我们需要重新认识一个真相，陆地本质上是一个物质固体，构成了一个划着历史行政界限的平台。海洋包括开放的大洋等，还有流动的大气，过去考虑国家发展时忽视了这些。现代科学震惊了我们，让我们反思，实验室发现了CFC的危险，随后NASA证实臭氧层空洞的存在，有害辐射束就这样放进来了，引发成千上万的皮肤癌。第一个气候变化条约——《蒙特利尔定书》（1987），由于赤裸裸的私利和缺乏新科学，仓促完成。

建造更美好的星球需要什么

有人预测，德班会议后，各国将通过增加消费追求更快的增长速度，环境问题只会被委婉而空洞地谈及，并不会提出实质解决办法，人类能获得的物质是有限的现实将逐渐凸兀。相应的反馈是急切地加速消费，企图强化地域安全——可贮存资源的储藏安全，还有军事实力及其造成威胁的能力。所有国家应保护资源限制消费，这本应是一条共同的‘‘入场’’条件，却不被重视，即使是善意的人给与了提醒。土地、海洋和化石燃料、铁矿等稀缺资源将引发侵略和战争。

众所周知的资本主义终归走到了危机时刻。马克思的预言如果成真将是非常可怕的事。他在《资本论》中写道，“在所有生产力尚有开发空间之前，没有社会秩序会消失”。过去的生产力建立在“原始”资料是免费的假设之上，而且，所有排放物——废气、废液和废物，都有容纳之处，都可以无偿地被大自然消化。然而，现在输入或输出都没有免费空间了。马克思不能想到这些细节问题，1859年，那会提出科学发展观？

现在，70亿人口的环境足迹填满了拥挤的空间，然而在过去，这个空间不仅宽敞而且无边无际。不仅缺乏资源的输入，最近令人吃惊的是，输出的废物也无处容身。人们希望，利用精心设计的碳“隔离”方法，用每吨20-30美元（资金从何而来）的成本将二氧化碳埋到深洞中，让社会几代人担心它带来的后果;在中国、美国加州和德国，人们正用改良技术努力改变能源结构，这是英雄之举，符合政治家风范，但是，根据目前心理定势预期的能源输出总额的增长需求相比，此举相形见绌。

经济和环境行为的利己主义

240年前，亚当·斯密提出了令人诧异的声明——人类从自身利益出发共同促进经济发展，这带来了经济学的突破性进展。他冥思苦想，认为以社会仁慈捐助者自居的人都不怀好意，这是声明的推论。要促进环境保护，唯一的出路是要符合个人和每个国家的自身利益。那些富得可以沉浸于哲学的好心人，虔诚地布道绿色理念，但是，这些人对于那些朝不保夕的人而言毫无可比性，他们会暗笑那些专心致力于挥霍财富的富人。

《蒙特利尔议定书》是全球‘‘梦魇’’，各国互相牵制,于是被迫承诺。臭氧层空洞在NASA的影像资料上显而易见，它会造成成千上百万人患皮肤癌，CFC的实验结果震惊了各国，他们签约承诺禁用那些氟化物的干扰化学品。由于环境问题广泛蔓延而匆忙签署《京都议定书》只会发生在恐惧和震惊之后。如果极地冰川融化加速并引发岛屿消失，威胁到世界海岸栖息地，那么，自利主义和真正的自卫本能将推动各国齐心协力走上正途，这条正道本应在德班大会提出，却将事与愿违不被提出。最近一段时间，极端天气事件频繁发生，然而，其表象并未折服世界，只让被洪水没及脖颈的巴基斯坦和泰国贫民对此信服。

12月10日，赶赴德班的代表团将陆续返回各自的国家，互相推脱责任，决心将加快增长速度和消费以免‘‘落伍’’，而环境不过是一个遥远的二选。不仅全球变暖和气候变化在决策中被遗忘，而且，因为有关废弃物和有害物的大量议题会减少就业机会而被避重就轻地一带而过。临界点就在那儿，莫名其妙地、不可避免地被突破而造就一场悲剧——天气终将引起饥荒、水资源污染或严重疾病的爆发。到那时，各国才能不顾私利地携手共度难关，共享知识，低声下气地赞成降低期望，保持在中国目前的发展目标——“中等富裕国家”，而不是西方资本主义风气下无拘无束快速发家致富的目标。

我们可以乐观地预言，解决之道可以轻而易举地找到，马克思在《资本论》中写道： “人类总是给自己制定自己能够完成的任务；随着对事物的了解入微，我们总将发现只有具备解决方案的物质条件或者至少正在形成的时候，任务才自然形成了。”

解决方案就在于新科学发展观之中。从原始人进化到现代人，我们至今所关注的“能源”，比如木料或原煤，都只是它们所能提供什么。现代热力工程师看到一吨原煤，会说它能产生24亿焦耳的热量。他能证明这个论断。实验室记录了试验的数据，这数据对设计钢厂和发电站非常有用。但是对现代世界而言，对全球经济和全球环境而言，24亿焦耳只解答了问题的一半。

新科学发展观期待得到世界领袖的赏识。只有在德班会议之后，当环境灾难震撼他们时，他们才会明白能源“消费”只是分子，其分母是一个天文数字，而我们要做的，是降低它势不可挡的增长速度。

Durban will be a disaster. An extension of Kyoto Protocol will not be achieved, even by existing List A counties, and there will certainly be no expansion to other countries. Nations will fall back to policies of individually increasing consumption and growth, and pursuing development goals that are not only unsustainable, but unattainable. The Copenhagen meeting showed what happens when representatives press their visions based on concepts of development that came out of the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago. The Cancun meeting reacted by humbly coming together diplomatically but feebly to try to establish for Durban a platform for negotiating a new phase of the Kyoto Protocol.

World leaders and their constituencies cannot face up to the facts of scientific development and furthermore cannot integrate concepts of economic development with the indomitable scientific laws governing our global environment. This will be a challenge too difficult, resulting in aggregate descent into dissent and turmoil. The current Global Financial Crisis together with major global environment problems are inextricably linked. Money is a mere representation of goods and services (matter and energy). Leaders in Durban will pretend that financial woes are different and separate from environment problems, and excuse themselves from responsibilities for the environment. In the aftermath, twin crises will merge as money hyperinflates and there is a rush to grab scarce resources today and a disinterest in tomorrow’s environmental disasters. European leaders looking to “bailout” Greece from its economic problems are simply presenting solutions in money terms such as “raising capitalization” or “creating euro bonds”. Americans are rightly clamoring for more jobs but wrongly hoping that creating more dollars out of nothing or even worse, attacking the EPA as a “job-killer” will improve their economy.

The bankers and economic strategist who over the decades rabidly endorsed deregulation of lending to insane extents, leading to the 2008 Wall Street crash, simply have the US government and most EU governments locked into their perspective. Facing breakdown of the financial world, they then promoted the solution of unimaginably large packages of stimulus, and deeper debt limits – money simply created on computer screens. The Wall Street protesters now occupying financial districts in the US and other rich countries are affronted that the key financial advisors were given obscene bonuses even as companies crashed and staff laid off. They had lobbied lawmakers to create new laws so that their rapacious logic was not technically criminal. President Obama came to power promising change and kept on the same financial advisors, and recruited their like.

Americans came to the New World centuries ago almost vacant (they perceived) and endowed with wonderful resources, and could grow rich for centuries before ecological services started to become unforgiving of their free abuse. The mental set is captured in the lyrics of Woody Guthrie
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me.
This mental set was alive and well under former president George W Bush of the wide open state of Texas and promoted previously by fellow Republican Ronald Regan of progressive California. Now Republicans are agitating for a showdown with Obama for the 2012 presidential elections, egged on by their Tea Party clique where presidential candidate Michele Bachmann insists that carbon dioxide is natural, needed by plants, and harmless. She uses the line that EPA is a “job killer” to excite the unemployed, ignoring the trend towards more jobs required produce a greener economy. The USA will send a low-power delegation to Durban with nothing to say or offer. The term “Climate Change” is a swear word on Washington’s Capitol Hill.

The previous Copenhagen and Cancun meetings
The buildup and expectations for COP15 in December 2009 in Norway were intense, with preliminary meetings around the world and an atmosphere of hope that acknowledgement of the downsides of failure would lead to disasters within decades. Pacific Ocean island nations emotionally portrayed their lands as disappearing under rising ocean levels. The Australian prime minister obnoxiously manipulated the meeting to portray himself as a saviour of the world and prime candidate to lead whatever new UN body was created to police emissions limits (effectively more powerful than the UN secretary general). The US dallied and would not commit. The Chinese, led by their premier, were not invited to participate in drafting what was to be a glorious united conclusion. It would be funny if it was not so serious, but the Australian prime minister, realizing the debacle that shattered his grand plans, stormed into the corridor announcing in quite rude swearing that he had been cheated by the Chinese. The irony was that he had previously told them he was their “true friend” (真友). The Chinese came home and set about their own ambitious agenda to reduce emissions and the Australian prime minister went home and was deposed by his deputy for messing up his carbon policy. European nations, who had worked assiduously for years to keep their Kyoto commitments were dismayed that the biggest polluters had not signed up. There were blames all around and many were bitterly disillusioned.

COP 16 in late 2010 in Mexico tried to pick up the fragile national egos from a year before and bring together some recognition that the 200 odd nations/territories around the globe really had to have some unity on global well-being. Not too much of substance was agreed, but at least there was wholesale agreement (only one country, landlocked Bolivia, dissented) to tackle the hard questions in Durban.

Observations of the “common senses” and need to upgrade to modern science

Through human history people use their five senses to establish the nature of the environment around them, what is good to eat, the functions of myriad objects, from stones to today’s complex accessories, and they look at the broader surroundings for what it can provide and what may be harmful. But as the global economy stretches the bounds of the globe’s environment, individuals and groups, and especially decision makers need to reconcile what they have acquired as common sense with global physical reality. This is the essence of the new outlook on scientific development. No longer can we rely on our senses to imagine that when we harness fuel for heat, the fuel has, “gone up in smoke”. Though an individual sees the horizon as boundless, and that somewhere over the rainbow there was always some new world, we now see our planet as a very materially closed system, with barely an atom leaving or entering it. We are orbiting and spinning in a vacuum, with the only external influence being with the forces of gravity and electromagnetic radiation to save us from oblivion.

The biosphere is simply the land, sea and air as a platform and environment to support plant and animal life, including humans. In modern science we need to revisit the obvious fact that land is essentially a physical solid, and constitutes a platform on which historical administrative boundaries are drawn. The sea – the open oceans, and more so, the air, being fluid, were formerly ignored in national development considerations. Modern science has jolted us to rethink that, with the scientific discovery of the dangers of CFC’s in the lab, and then NASA’s proof with imagery of a hole in the ozone layer, letting in harmful radiation set to cause millions of skin cancers. The first climate change treaty, Montreal 1987, was rushed through out of shock from new science and unabashed self-interest.

What is needed for a better planet

It is predicted that after Durban and nations pursue their own races to higher growth through increased consumption, while merely mealy-mouthing environmental concerns, the reality of finite matter within our reach will become manifest. The response will be to greedily speed up consumption and attempt to strengthen positions of security – security of stocks of storable resources and also of military might and capacity to threaten. The need for a common and joint admission that all nations should conserve resources and limit consumption will not be heeded, even if well-meaning people mention it. There will be aggression and battles over resources – land, sea, and the fossil fuels, ores and anything scarce.

Capitalism, as we know it, will be in crisis. It is quite eerie that Marx’s prediction will come true. He wrote in Capital, “No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed”. The productive forces of the past have been based on the assumption that “virgin” resources are free, and that there was room for all emissions – gases, liquids and solids, to be dumped back into Nature for free. There is no free room left on the input or output side. Marx could not have imagined the details because the science required for a new outlook on development had not been discovered in 1859.

Now we face the specter of 7 billion people with environmental footprints cramming and crowding a space previously considered not only very large, but boundless. There are shortages of resources to input, and just as seriously, and only a recent surprise, no where to hide unwanted waste output. Through the fancy term of carbon “sequestration”, we hope to pay $20-30 per ton (money from where?) to bury carbon dioxide down deep holes and let society generations on worry about its consequences. The efforts to change the energy mix to hopefully more benign technologies, as is occurring in China, California, and Germany are heroic and statesmanlike, but will be dwarfed by the gross increases in energy output “demanded” by expectations under the current mental set.

Self-interest in economic and environmental behavior

The breakthrough for the success in the discipline of economics came 240 years ago when Adam Smith made the startling assertion that people acting in self-interest collectively promoted economic development. As a corollary he mused that people posing as benevolent givers to society were mainly up to no good. To promote environmental conservation, the only success will be if it appeals to individuals’ and individual nations’ self-interest. Pious preaching of green ideals by those well-intentioned and affluent enough to enjoy philosophy will do no good for those struggling for the next meal, and will be sniggered at by greedy rich who are bent on engorging their current wealth.

With the Montreal Protocol, it was global fear, mutual among nations, that forced commitment. A hole in the ozone layer, threatening millions of people to skin cancer, obvious in NASA imagery, and the lab results of CFC’s shocked nations into signing up to ban the offending chemicals. Wide-scale environmental concern, and rush to sign some future form of Kyoto Protocol will only happen through fear and shock. If polar ice melting accelerated and caused some islands to disappear, and threatened seashore habitation world wide, self-interest, indeed self-preservation would drive nations together in a way they are supposed to at Durban but will not. The recent past has witnessed increasing extremes of weather, but the pattern has not yet convinced world opinion, and it is mainly the poor in Pakistan and Thailand up to their necks in flooding.

On December 10, when delegates fly out of Durban to their own countries, blaming each other, determined to increase growth and consumption as a way out of recession, the environment will be a distant second concern. Not only will Global Warming and Climate Change be ignored in decisions, but the wider issues of all waste, and hazards will be skimmed over in the rush for more employment. Somewhere, somehow, inevitably there will be a tipping point into tragedy – weather causing famine or contaminated water, or a major disease outbreak. Only then, out of self-interest, will nations be driven together to share knowledge and humbly agree to reduce expectations to the level China has now set as its goal – that of a “moderately well-off society”, rather than the unregulated some get rich quick ethos of Western capitalism.

We can optimistically forecast that out of difficulties, a solution will unfold. Marx wrote in Capital,

mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for the solution already exist, or are at least in the process of formation.

A solution which suggests itself lies in the new outlook on scientific development. From primitive man and evolution up to an including the current time, what we now focus on as “sources of energy” such as wood or coal, are only conceived of as what they can give. A modern thermodynamic engineer will look at a ton of coal and says it can generate 24 gigajoules of heat. He can prove it. The data is recorded in lab tests and proves very useful for designing steel mills and electric power plants. But for the modern world, which is both a global economy and global environment, 24 Gj is only half the answer.

There is a new outlook on scientific development waiting for world leaders to realize. It will only be after Durban, when environmental catastrophes shock them, that they will know that energy “consumption” is a numerator that has a denominator – a huge number whose inexorable increase we need to slow.

美国加利福尼亚州与空气污染细颗粒物的斗争，显然是经济发展与环境保护紧张关系的一次教训。这次斗争是在美国加州环保局的加州空气资源委员会（CARB）与Killcarb.org组织之间展开的。环境加强监管后，管理成本自然上升，受其影响的利益相关者组成了名为Killcarb.org的协会。在中国人眼里，加州是“牛仔领地”，利益相关者之间的争夺异常激烈；而且，公众对抗场面也相当壮观。众所周知，加州前州长阿诺德•施瓦辛格（Arnold Schwarzenegger）是电影明星，其反对党故作姿态，分析时间、能源和资金的耗费，引导观望者痛下决心不再消极而妥协处理各种问题。

排放、监测和控制细颗粒物（PM2.5）的案例是一个极好的例子，其教训恰巧与中国实际相联系，值得中国学习借鉴。科学理论表明，直径小于2.5微米的细颗粒物危害健康。单一的颗粒物就能进入人体、肺甚至血液。虽然裸眼看不见细颗粒物，但它扭曲了光线，因而降低了能见度，我们称之为阴霾或烟雾。PM2.5主要来自发动机（特别是交通）和燃炉（特别是供电和供暖）中的燃烧。仅是一个极微小的2.5微米的颗粒物，很可能由百万亿个原子组成，通常，其中70%是碳原子。

空气中细颗粒物的浓度以毫克/立方米（mcg/M3）为单位。美国环保局（USEPA）提出了一项非常有效的评级体系，将<50界定为好，>300界定为危害大众健康，介于二者的区间范围界定为危害脆弱群体。许多公民认识到可以根据每小时的数据来调整各项活动，例如，当数值高时，避免高强度活动。

然而不幸的是，PM2.5普遍存在和健康的直接关系并不明晰。即使在1952年12月伦敦的大烟雾极端事件中，因此而死亡的人数并不确切，据说是介于4000到12000之间。就峰值，伦敦每天死亡人数的平均值从700（所有原因的正常死亡）增加到900。

加州，特别是洛杉矶和南部山谷流域地区，也曾经发生极端烟雾事件。地形导致自然大气逆温和雾，二战后工业的迅猛发展加重了大气污染，并达到了无法容忍、臭名昭著的地步。加州政府高瞻远瞩，在联邦EPA采取措施之前就着手开始解决该问题。

加州经济充满活力、节节攀升，愿意投入环境保护以维护好莱坞和加州海滩文化所塑造的健康、生气勃发的形象。加州的富人极力支持声名远播的大学和研究所，从而对解决和缓解环境问题充满信心，因为他们能承担解决环境问题所需的费用。此外在加州，公众也愿意以他们的视角加强监督，与商品生产和服务的利益相关者严重对立。

睡着时间的推移，加州空气资源委员会越来越强大。2008年，委员会健康和生态系统部新任命的主任作为一个权力机构官员，作为一项报告主笔人，主张提高标准降低PM2.5排放。该报告评述了一批原创研究项目，并以PM2.5排放和早逝之间关系为题进行二次研究。二次研究并不直接涉及死亡原因的科学原理，但对原创研究中死因和影响的关系进行统计分析。最后，报告建议PM2.5排放标准应从12mcg/M3下降到7 mcg/M3。Killcarb.com协会对标准调整给商业和就业所带来的影响感到悚然，最主要是影响欣欣向荣的卡车运输依赖型商业。大卡车通常是由内燃机发动的，司机是以冒黑色烟雾作为机器正常运作的标志。

2009年的加州，如同1870年的战场。是一场开放战。由于报告统计分析，不是直接的科学，因此容易引起争议，随后炸弹就引爆了。这位主笔人在向所有利益相关者简要介绍后，被指控诈骗。因为他统计学博士学位并不是从他所宣称的加州大学戴维斯分校获得，而是邮购的假学历。加州州长阿诺德•施瓦辛格（Arnold Schwarzenegger）试图为这位主笔人辩护，并指出审稿人是杰出专家。同样不可思议的是，委员会的两名成员明知其博士学历是假的却还为其掩饰，或许是为了实施官僚权力，又或许只是因为他们认为报告本身很不错。

这个问题是许多地球科学辩论的小插曲：在微观层面，科学事实是不容置疑的，但是在宏观层面，我们的地球，对于许多科学问题而言，实在太大，太复杂从而难以圈定到一个单一事实或因素之上。对全球变暖这个问题，各种答案来自统计分析和计算机模型，存在很大程度的主观、预期或潜意识的偏见。加州PM2.5报告的主笔人不诚实到以邮购博士学位证书冒充威名远播（离得很近）的加州大学戴维斯分校的博士学位的弄虚作假，使得所有真实信息都变得可疑。

找到问题的解决方案是件好事。现在，无线电子监测装置现在无所不在，新技术质量不断提高，也降低了成本。除了监视摄像机和监听装置之外，环境监测已经发展出一门崭新学科——生态信息学。中国可以说走在这门学科前沿，2010年在北京召集召开了国际环境信息科学学会会议。

PM2.5的监测现在是项已成熟的可靠技术。美国驻华使馆有一部仪器每小时向互联网和推特（Twitter）发送报告。然而，绘制一幅大型时空图像，之后进行分析，减少事实被简单概念化，是所面临的更严峻的挑战。

艾伦·马克思女士（Ellen Marks）已研究了数十年并坚持积极思考。她为RTI工作，负责中国论题，RTI是美国北卡罗来纳州周边的大学组建的大型研究机构。笔者有幸听她谈论“数据可视化”情况。她将一份难以用简单语言概念化的350页报告用16张图表述出来了。

2009年，美国政府与RTI签约监测180个社区的PM2.5。基于过去10年生态信息学的进展、政务透明化，每个人能看到他们周边地区的三维图。这能帮助他们决定是否外去慢跑和制定慢跑路线，从而避开烟雾。从长远来看，还能影响房地产价值。

地球现在有70亿人口。我们所有人呼吸着相同的空气。然而，空气是流动的也是无形的。地球公民都需要知晓这一点。1661年，英国约翰·伊夫琳（John Evelyn）慷慨激昂地向国王上书请求减轻燃煤造成的阴霾。他提议改良燃料，将污染产业往外迁移“数英里”。250年后，伦敦烟雾事件发生，市民才注意到了伊芙琳的请求。人们将之调侃为“杰文斯悖论”——工业革命提高了技术效率，但这也促进更多的原煤消费，因此，尽管单位燃料排放量下降了，可是总污染排放却增长了。

阿尔·戈尔（Al Gore）通过获奖纪录片《不容忽视的真相》，通俗地解释了温水青蛙的两难境地：如果突然放入热水中，青蛙就会跳起来；但如果逐渐加热，青蛙会尝试着适应新环境也还是死去。在欧洲，虽然污染物已不是问题，然而污染物却导致预期寿命减短了。即使现代有了大型空气过滤器，但人们不可能只呆在家里。因此，温水青蛙的道理我们应该懂得，并积极向公众传播。

直接投资收益理所当然是人类决策和行动的重要动因。过去30年，中国在紧紧跟随西方200年工业革命步伐，但逐渐地，中国意识到了‘‘前车之鉴’’，并努力改善，现在中国拥有先进的清洁技术。这也正是中国戏曲了欧美国家的教训而得来的。

新中国的经历有一些与众不同之处。正当欧洲和美国的议会谴责少数党的领导阶层而陷入困境，在为预算和环境问题争吵不休，中国则拥有一个统一的领导阶层，谋求出类拔萃的政策建议和治理政见。中国在2007年将新的科学发展观写入党章，它将会为走出‘‘烟雾’’指明道路。

The tension between economic development and environmental protection provides an obvious lesson in Californian over the battle concerning fine particulate air pollution. The contest is between the California Air Resources Board (CARB) of USA California Environment Protection Agency and KILLCARB.ORG, the association of stakeholders threatened by higher costs of increased regulation. From the Chinese perspective, California is “cowboy territory” of aggressive contention between stakeholders, and the public confrontations are a spectacle. The participation of the Governor, movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger阿诺·施瓦辛格guarantees public recognition. Analysis of the wasted time, energy and money in the posturing by opposing parties can lead observers to have a greater determination to manage various aspects in a compromising rather than destructive way.

The case of emitting and then monitoring and regulating fine particulate matter (PM2.5) provides and excellent example and give a pertinent lesson for China. Basic science shows that fine particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 microns or smaller is harmful to health. A single particle can enter the human body and lungs and even blood stream. Figure 1 shows the relative size of a human hair with PM10 pollutants and the even smaller PM2.5. Fine particulate matter is invisible to the naked eye, but distorts light and thus diminishes visibility we call haze or smog. The main sources of PM2.5 are combustion in engines (especially traffic) and furnaces (especially electric power and heating generators). Even a tiny particle of matter 2.5 microns across consists on atoms, perhaps a hundred trillion, and typically about 70% are carbon atoms.

The intensity of fine particulate matter in the air is measured in micrograms per cubic meter. The US EPA provides a useful rating system classing >[WZN1] 50 as good and a scale indicating dangers to vulnerable groups and that <300[WZN2] is hazardous to general population. Many citizens aware of the dangers and of the access to hourly readouts regulate their activities accordingly, for example refraining from strenuous activity if the reading is high.

Yet unfortunately the direct relationship between PM2.5 prevalence and health is not clear. Even in the extreme case of the Great Smog of December 1952 inLondon, the number of people killed is not certain, said to be between 4,000 and 12,000. At the peak, deaths in London rose from an average of 700 per day (normal, from all causes) to 900 per day.

California, and especially Los Angeles and the southern valley basin have also experienced extreme smog. The topography causes natural atmospheric inversion and fogs and the fierce development after WWII exacerbated air pollution to infamous and intolerable levels. The California State Government moved proactively ahead of the Federal EPA to address the problem.

California has had a vibrant progressive economy and was willing to invest in environmental protection to uphold a wholesome healthy image as epitomized by Hollywood and California beach culture. California’s wealth had nurtured prestigious universities and research institutions and thus with confidence were environmental problems addressed and alleviated. They could afford to fix. If this had been China in the 21 century, the stakeholders wanting to directly make money from economic activities and the wider public concerned about environmental downside would not have been allowed or encouraged to voice their disputes to the media or sue each other in court. But in California they did and the momentum of increasing regulation collided as a public spectacle with the stakeholders producing goods and services.

The California Air Resources Board had grown powerful. In 2008 a newly appointed Manager to the Health and Ecosystems Section of CARB clearly was driven by wanting to make a name for himself as a powerful bureaucrat as lead author on a report recommending a lower level for PM2.5 emissions. The report described secondary research on a range of primary research projects into the link between PM2.5 emissions and premature death. The secondary research did not directly deal with the science of death causes, but on statistical analysis to link cause and effect in the primary studies. In conclusion the report recommended that PM2.5 emission standards should be lowered from 12 micrograms/M3 to 7 mcg/M3. The association called KILLCARB.ORG was horrified at the impact this would have on business and jobs, and most especially on the thriving truck transport business. Big trucks are invariably diesel, and the driver and mechanics’ dream is black smoke as a sign of healthy combustion.

In California 2009 this was equivalent to a gunfight 1870. It was open war. Because the analysis was statistical, not straight science, it was easy to argue interpretations and bias. Then the bomb exploded. The lead author, vocal at the briefing to all stakeholders, was accused of fraud. His PhD in statistics was not from UC Davis as claimed, but was a fake mail-order. Incredibly California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger阿诺·施瓦辛格tried to defend the lead author and cited the eminent peer reviewers. Also incredibly, two of the Board had known the PhD was fake but covered up, maybe to enforce bureaucratic power, or maybe just because they thought the report was good by itself, regardless of the lead author’s credentials.

This problem serves as a vignette for many Earth sciences debates: at the microlevel, scientific fact is unquestionable, but at the macroscale, our Earth is too big and complex for many scientific questions to be pinned down to a single fact or factor. As in the whole question of global warming, the answers are supplied through statistical analysis and computer modeling and are very much open to subjective biases, intended or subconscious. For the lead author of the California PM2.5 report to be insincere to the point of pretending a mail-order doctoral certificate is a genuine PhD from the prestigious (and nearby!) UC Davis puts any verity to question. Given universal human nature, China will also need to contend with similar issues, and the goal, or at least the direction, is to improve science and lessen risks of prejudiced interpretation.

Dynamic Data Visualization

There are some good news solutions becoming available. Electronic wireless monitoring devices are now becoming ubiquitous through new technologies improving qualities and lowering costs. Besides surveillance cameras and listening devices, environmental monitoring has grown into a new discipline of Ecological Informatics. The International Society for Environmental Information Sciences convened in Beijing in 2010 and China is at the forefront of the discipline.

For PM2.5, monitoring is now an established reliable technology. There is one instrument at the US Embassy in Beijing reporting hourly on the Internet and Twitter. The more difficult challenge is in mapping a broad picture in space and time and then analyzing it to reduce the facts to be easily conceptualized.

There is an answer. Ms Ellen Marks has decades of research experience and still thinking forward. She manages China interests for RTI, the giant research triangle of universities around North Carolina, USA. Now based in Beijing it is mesmerizing to hear her talk of “data visualization”. As an example she describes a 350 page report with 16 graphs that is hard to conceptualize in one thought-byte. But new software can grasp a trend in several seconds. For understanding PM2.5, this can be a outstandingly insightful.

Outside your window now, the sky is moving. The hazards in the air can be tracked, real-time. Pressure is being brought to make this knowable. The US government in 2009 contracted RTI to monitor 180 communities for PM2.5. Based on progress in the past decade of ecological informatics, with government transparency, individuals can see 3D graphics of their neighborhood. This can help decide if they will jog or not, and jog away from the smog. In the long run it can influence property values. This technology is coming to China and should be welcomed.

Educating the public

We are now 7 billion people in historically artificial boundaries called “194 nations and territories” according to the UN. We all breathe the same air. The hundreds million in North America and the billions in Asia all share the same air. But air is fluid. It flows. More troublesome, trouble is the air is invisible. Earthlings need to know. In England in 1661 John Evelyn wrote to his king passionately requesting ameliorating the coal-fired haze. He proposed better fuel, and that polluting industries be removed “a few miles”. It was 250 years later after The Great London Smog that the city heeded Evelyn’s plea. One reason for the dalliance was identified as the “Jevons Paradox” – the Industrial Revolution improved technological efficiency but this only encouraged greater consumption of coal, so that total pollution increased even as emissions per unit of fuel decreased.

Al Gore’s award winning documentary, Inconvenient Truth, popularized the dilemma of the frog in hot water: If placed suddenly in hot water it will jump out; but if in water that is comfortable but gradually heated, the frog will try to acclimatize and will die. Educated people should be at the forefront of awareness of emissions. Though there are many important factors in life, including wishing to be in a city for better income and amenities, enjoying decent life expectancy must also be a factor. Even in Europe where pollutions have been assiduously addressed, estimates of reduce life expectancy due to emissions is estimated at least a few months. Promoters of modern large scale airfilters scare customers with gross overestimates of reduced life expectancy, so like the frog in the warming water, it is hard to know when to make a critical decision on changing the environment. Chinese cities are criticized by visitors and now even China Daily (2011:12:6) headlines smog as a severe hazard and quotes the eminent Chinese health experts as identifying PM2.5 as replacing smoking as a top risk factor for lung cancer.

Ignorance on both sides or being smart together

Certainly direct vested interest is a major driver in human decisions and actions. So the environmentally conscious experts in a government institution, even if they have a fake degree like the example above in California, will try to enforce strict regulations for clean living. At the same time the truck drivers, the factory managers and their employees, and similar interests all want jobs and income. Sometimes Westerners sneer at the Chinese Governments quest for “harmonious” resolution of social problems, especially when obvious conflicts of interest are denied or hidden. But China has fast-tracked the West’s 200 years of Industrial Revolution in the past 30 years and is now leading technologies that will make the environment cleaner. Piggybacking the West’s recent advances in monitoring using satellite imagery and field transmitters of data, China will leapfrog some of the mistakes in development in Europe and America.

And there is something else very different in the new China experience. Just as parliaments in Europe and the US are bogged down with blaming and minority leadership, arguing over budgets and environment, China does have a unified leadership seeking the best and brightest policy advice and management. Professor Ma Zhong, Dean of Environment at RenminUniversity is an excellent example of how China will progress. In the new areas in China’s remoter regions, Professor Ma is vocal on not using second hand equipment from old industry, but investing in state of the art renewable energies and green technologies. Old factories on the east coast are scrapped for good. China’s new outlook on scientific development, written into the Constitution in 2007, will lead the way out of the smog.

[WZN1]John, I think you mean no more than 50 mg/m3 is good, right? If it’s true, then it should be < instead. Please clarify here (>50) and next note (<300).

[WZN2]See above.

能量是一种核算单位，可以用于衡量不同类型的力，包括重力、核能、太阳辐射和化学键。我们的星球以2.66 x 1040kg/m2/s动量在轨道上绕着太阳飞驰，以7.074 x 1033kg/m2/s角动量旋转。这些是自然赋予人类的免费礼物，人类无法控制，由它们给人类送来了四季、昼夜和宜居气候。太阳辐射是免费的，我们也不需要为重力付费。

但我们经常误算成本，水力发电是一个例子。湍流的水的力量是免费的蒸发作用和免费的地心引力下落作用的结果，人力成本是在开采矿山资源和在发电设施的设计和制造中产生的。人类提供的能量消耗在断裂烃类（主要是化石燃料）和碳水化合物（木材燃料和食物）中的碳氢键之中。

人类农耕和采矿所使用的能量，来自碳氢键断裂“释放”的热和力量，以满足人类需求（加热、生产和运输），结果是每个碳原子与空气中的一个或两个氧原子牢牢地结合到一起。一氧化碳中毒的人都希望氧原子与碳原子断裂分离，这样他们就能够再呼吸。然而，只有光合作用这样的奇迹才能实现，太阳释放的光子不断碰撞叶子，让二氧化碳分解，重新吸收为碳，释放氧。

分子寻求分母

令人难以捉摸的奇迹是，燃料一旦被使用就消失不见：油箱空荡荡；木料付之一炬；煤炭化为灰烬。自（史前石器时代）穴居人时期以来，直到1970 年之前，这些都是无所谓的事。现在，科学迫使我们注意到12克的碳燃烧产生44克的二氧化碳的事实。某些绿色主义者提议，通过立法，要求汽车司机将行驶产生的废气储存在后备箱，当排放物超重时，就驶入垃圾场银行缴纳罚款。要知道，一辆汽车每年产生7吨的废气。

更具挑战性的科学问题是，释放出的能量到底从何而来？化学工程师的回答总是老生常谈，事实证明那确实是相当肤浅的答案。在单个原子和分子水平上，一个分子的最简单燃料、天然气或甲烷（CH4）的燃烧，与两个氧原子结合，产生一个二氧化碳分子和两个水分子。燃料中碳和氢之间的库仑力与氧气分子中氧原子间的库仑力之和是27eV。燃烧后，新分子聚集了35eV的键能，释放了8eV用于加热、驱动汽车，或任意经济活动。1千克的燃料所释放的能量在14-46兆焦（megajoule，106焦耳）之间，木头、面包、天然气、煤、奶油、植物油、汽油依次增加。

Defining “energy”

The father of the scientific method, Francis Bacon, listed four sources of false thinking, of which the most insidious was misuse of language. He targeted “names of things which exist, but yet confused and ill-defined, and hastily and irregularly derived from realities”. One such abstract noun is “energy” – only coined 160 years ago by James Joule to express the relationship between a mechanical force (turning a wheel) and the heat unintentionally generated. It proved a useful concept but is now the source of endless confusion. Economists and politicians seem oblivious of the laws of physics: Energy cannot be created or destroyed, so it is wrong to say it is produced or consumed – it is transformed from useful to “unavailable” energy.

Energy is an accounting term that covers disparate types of forces, including gravity, nuclear, solar radiation and chemical bonding. If economists insist on accounting “global energy”, they would be exasperated when a scientist told them about the most important energy of the Earth. Our planet is hurtling through space on its orbit around the sun with a momentum of 2.66 x 1040kg/m2/s and its rotation had an angular momentum of 7.074 x 1033kg/m2/s. But these are free gifts of Nature humans have no control over that deliver seasons and day and night, and livable climates. Solar radiation is free and we do not have to pay for gravity either. Hydropower is an example where we miscalculate the costs. The force of rushing water is the result of free evaporation up and free gravity down, and human cost is in the work required to mine resources and design and manufacture components for the electricity generating facility. The energy that humans have to pay for is the breaking of bonds between carbon and hydrogen in hydrocarbons (mainly fossil fuels) and carbohydrates (wood fuels and foods).

Very few of the decision-makers and power-brokers at the Durban Conference will know or appreciate this (below) scientific fact: That when humans use energy that they have to work for, in farming and mining, there are carbon-hydrogen bonds broken to “release” heat and forces for human demand (heating, manufacture, transport) and the result is each carbon atom bonding very strongly with one or two oxygen atoms from the atmosphere. The C-H bond is held together with a matrix of coulombic forces that requires 4.2 eV to break but the carbon immediately bonds with O2 at 8.3 eV or worse, with one atom of oxygen at 11.1 eV. No one inhaling carbon monoxide can hope that the oxygen atom will break back off to let them breathe. Only the miracle of photosynthesis, with photons from the sun bombarding leaves, can break carbon dioxide back to absorb carbon and release oxygen. For nearly all leaders at Durban, it is too late for them to realize the consequences of this simple science. Instead they will be bent on deceiving each other with trick definitions and statistics.

A numerator begging for a denominator.

The uncanny miracle is that fuel seems to disappear once we use it. The gas tank gets empty. The log fire has gone up in smoke. Coal is reduced to cinders. That has been fine from cavemen days up to about 1970. Now science forces us to be aware that 12 grams of carbon combust resulting in 44 grams of carbon dioxide. Some greenies have suggested car drivers should be legislated to be forced to drive around with emissions stored in the car trunk, and delivered to a dump bank to pay a penalty when the weight of emissions gets too heavy. A car produces about 7 tons of emissions per year.

A more challenging science is to wonder, where does the released energy actually come from? Chemical engineers have a blasé answer which turns out to be quite superficial. At the level of single atoms and molecules, one molecule of the simplest fuel, natural gas, or methane (CH4) combusts with two molecules of oxygen and results in one molecule of carbon dioxide and two of water. The total of coulombic forces between carbon and hydrogen in the fuel, and between oxygen atoms in their molecules is 27 electronvolts. After combustion the new molecules have aggregate bond energy of 35 eV and 8 eV is “released”, and “available” for heating, or driving a car, or any economic use. A kilogram of any fuel gives off energy within the range of 14 to 46 megajoules – that is, wood, bread, natural gas, coal, butter, plant oil, gasoline, in ascending order.

It seems the inverse of common sense that in a fuel combustion equation, 27 eV becomes a larger number, 35 eV, with difference as the energy we need for economic activity. The answer to this puzzle has not been the goal of scientific inquiry up till now. At some future meeting after Durban, it will be a hot topic, and indeed the core subject. A molecule of methane has bonds that can be broken totaling a value equivalent to 27 eV. However there are other coulombic forces within the atoms that do not break in combustion, and in the molecules formed after combustion, there are more, tighter bonds, locking up the carbon. Chemists, if forced to address this phenomenon, will say the energy in those bonds is “unavailable”, and that entropy has increased. In the future, from a perspective of managing environment, instead of industrial engineers, economists, administrators and leaders talking about “energy produced” “energy demand” and “energy consumed”, a fuel will be defined by how much energy it can make available, and after use, how much energy is still there, locked up, and useless. For one methane molecule the numerator, 27, has a denominator estimated to be about 464 eV. After it is used, the result is the numerator 35 (as in conventional calculations) over a denominator of 456 eV. The economic process has driven entropy of 27/464 to 35/456, ie, an increase from 5.8% to 7.7%. The world “use” of energy from all economic sources was 450 exajoules in 2010. That is the numerator, and the denominator of “unavailable” energy is (my estimate) 26,000 exajoules. In some future, I imagine every individual has an “environmental footprint” meter measured as a numerator and denominator in joules on a LED screen on their forehead. The numerator says how many joules of usable energy they destroyed in their daily life, and the denominator shows where it went as waste into our common environment. A guy like Donald Trump, far from being admired, would be a pariah. Instead of fighting for and boasting over energy harnessed and used to power economic activity we should be humbly seeking ways to slow the entropy increase. One day in the future, after the conference in Durban has disintegrated into recriminations, there will be a Conference of Parties, and the parties will genuinely, and humbly, out of self interest seek aversion from the troubles suffered through global commitment to a safer environment.