Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao urges rich Western countries to abandon their ‘unsustainable’ way of life, so as to respond to Climate Change.

Hmm.

China has long resisted calls to join rich nations in setting targets for emissions cuts, saying its relatively low per capita emissions and recent emergence as a major source of greenhouse gases should exempt it from action.

Scientists said in September that China had leapfrogged the United States as the world’s biggest producer of carbon dioxide (CO2), one of the principal gases that cause global warming.

One thing which is really, absolutely unsustainable in rich countries is the inexorable growth of the state and associated collectivist instincts:

In its assumptions about the size of the state and the role of government, almost every advanced nation is more left than it was, and getting lefter.

Even in America, federal spending (in inflation-adjusted 2007 dollars) has gone from $600 billion in 1965 to $3 trillion today. The Heritage Foundation put it in a convenient graph: It’s pretty much a straight line across four decades, up, up, up.

Doesn’t make any difference who controls Congress, who’s in the White House. The government just grows and grows, remorselessly.

And it’s set to get worse. Much worse:

The President-elect’s so-called “tax cut” will absolve 48 per cent of Americans from paying any federal income tax at all, while those that are left will pay more. Just under half the population will be, as Daniel Henninger pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, on the dole.

By 2012, it will be more than half, and this will be an electorate where the majority of the electorate will be able to vote itself more lollipops from the minority of their compatriots still dumb enough to prioritize self-reliance, dynamism, and innovation over the sedating cocoon of the nanny state.

That is the death of the American idea — which, after all, began as an economic argument: “No taxation without representation" is a great rallying cry. “No representation without taxation” has less mass appeal.

For how do you tell an electorate living high off the entitlement hog that it’s unsustainable and you’ve got to give some of it back?

Quite.

Sooner or later it will all just crash. And that will hurt.