Just a quick note on a couple of interesting articles that surfaced today about the five-month drought in central China. The AP reports that Chinese businesses and residents are facing the largest energy crisis in years, as hydroelectric capacity is now at a low. Elaine Kurtenbach reports about the worst-affected areas:
The worst will
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Last week, WikiLeaks published a new round of diplomatic cables in concert with an annual meeting of the Arctic Council in Nuuk, Greenland. Written between 2007 and 2010, the cables highlight the lingering sense of global insecurity over who owns what at the rooftop of the world. They don’t cover any particularly new ground, but they …
An interesting debate showed up in my Twitter feed today. A few followers of China’s green energy policies have taken climate skeptic Bjorn Lomborg’s recent opinion piece in the Washington Post to task for using some information that undersells what China has accomplished.
I hadn’t read Lomborg’s article, which ran on April …
Here in the U.S. there’s a lot of excitement that 2011 could really be the Year of the Electric Car. GM is coming out with its plug-in model the Volt, Nissan has the all-electric Leaf and Ford has announced a line of plug-ins, hybrids and electrics. Throw in outside-the-box ideas like the Israeli startup Better Place, along with …
As the National People’s Congress kicks off in Beijing, Chinese leaders’ priorities for the nation were rolled out over the weekend in the 11th five-year plan (2011-2015). Among those priorities, which include pledges to improve pollution, increase clean energy production and reduce the nation’s yawning wealth gap, is tackling …
Last week environmental activists in Brazil – and Hollywood – were celebrating a victory over what is slated to become the world’s third largest hydroelectric plant. A Brazilian court in Para state ruled last Friday that the state-backed project, key to President’s Dilma Rousseff’s infrastructure push to support Brazil’s …
China’s Environment Minster has published an essay on the web site of his young agency warning that if the nation doesn’t do more to mitigate the environmental consequences of the nation’s economic expansion, things won’t be expanding for long.
Zhou Shengxian writes:
“In China’s thousands of years of civilization, the conflict
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Ugh. Hong Kong’s English daily South China Morning Post has a distinctly unsavory dispatch from the Chinese media this morning: Government scientists have released research that millions of acres of Chinese agricultural land and over 12 million tons of Chinese grain are contaminated by toxic metal pollution, according to this …
China is a nation of superlatives, and its role in weather manipulation is no exception. Beijing runs the world’s largest program in cloud seeding – the process of imbuing clouds with silver iodide to generate precipitation, usually in times of drought. China rolled out its cloud seeding technology to clear the skies of dust and …
I’m in Dhaka this week, where I have been doing some work between my long hours becoming intimate with the Bangladeshi capital’s epic traffic. The traffic here — an unholy tangle of rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, buses, trucks, cars and motorbikes — puts everything I have seen in Jakarta, India, Bangkok and Los Angeles (please!) to …