As the final harmonies of the Live Earth concert in Shanghai faded, Western journalists started singing their predictable songs about China's environmental problems. The lyrics are now very familiar - filthy factories, coal-fired power stations, glaciers melting, pollution affecting Seoul and Tokyo, and rivers too toxic to touch.

For balance, the journalists usually provide a sentence reminding us that China's environmental footprint is still below that of the United States and other industrialized nations. The first half of the next sentence then accepts a theoretical right for China to equalize pollution to equalize wealth but after a comma, the right is revoked.

Western journalists miss a significant problem. Using nation-based statistics to argue about the environmental impacts of a globalizing world is intellectual deceit.