We begin by sketching what China's economy will look like in 2025, two decades from now. It is desirable to do this quantitatively, both to indicate the practical possibilities open to China and to demythologize statements that suggest large magnitudes -"the next economic superpower"-without specifying what they are. Of course, no one really knows what China will look like in two decades, and indeed a range of outcomes is possible. In its recently released "Global Scenarios to 2025" the Royal

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... tch/Shell (oil) Company allows China's growth to vary from 6.7 to 8.4 percent a year, depending on the nature of the external (world) economic and political environment. As we shall see, others would allow the possibility of even lower growth rates. For sake of concreteness, I will build here upon the 2025 projections of the US Department of Energy, yielding a growth in dollar terms of 7.2 percent a year. They will not necessarily be correct, but they represent an internally consistent projection that is reasonably optimistic about China's growth, and ties that growth to projections of energy demand, an important source of interaction between China and the rest of the world, both in economic and in environmental terms. We can then address the implications of this growth, and take excursions from the baseline projection.