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“For China’s 1.3 billion people,” says Lester R. Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington, DC-based research institute, “the American dream is fast becoming the Chinese dream. Millions of Chinese are living like Americans—eating more meat, driving cars, traveling abroad, and otherwise spending their fast-rising incomes much as Americans do.”

Already total consumption in China of several basic commodities including grain, meat, coal, and steel, has overtaken that of the United States. Question: what happens when projected income per person in China reaches the current U.S. level in 2031 and consumption per person of grain, oil, and steel in China also reaches the U.S. level? The answer is that China’s grain consumption would be two thirds of current world production. Its oil use of 99 million barrels a day would exceed current world output of 79 million barrels per day. And it would consume more steel than the entire Western industrialized world does today.

The fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy that evolved in the West will not work for China simply because there are not enough resources. Nor will it work for India or for the other 3 billion people in the developing world. And, most importantly, in an integrated global economy where all countries are competing for the same dwindling resources, it will not continue to work for the 1.2 billion who live in the affluent industrial societies either.

China is teaching us that we need a new economic model. In energy, for example, it will be one that is based not on fossil fuels but that instead harnesses renewable sources of energy including wind power, hydropower, geothermal energy, solar cells, solar thermal power plants, and biofuels. In the search for new energy, wind meteorologists will replace petroleum geologists. And transport systems will be designed to maximize mobility rather than car use.

Plan A, business as usual, is no longer a viable option. We need to turn quickly to Plan B before the geopolitics of oil, grain, and raw material scarcity lead to economic instability, political conflict, and a disruption of the social order on which economic progress depends.