Regulator Warns on China Environment Woes

[jpak]

http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CHINA_ENVIRONMENT?SITE=CAWOO&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2006-03-11-12-59-34

BEIJING (AP) -- China must sharply improve environmental protection or it could face disaster following two decades of breakneck growth that have poisoned its air, water and soil, the country's top environmental official warned Saturday.

The director of the State Environmental Protection Administration said that more than half of China's 21,000 chemical companies are near the Yangtze and Yellow rivers - drinking water for tens of millions of people - and accidents could lead to "disastrous consequences."

"Facts have proved that prosperity at the expense of the environment is very superficial and very weak," Zhou Shengxian said at a news conference during the annual meeting of China's parliament. "It's only delaying disaster."

China's cities are among the world's smoggiest and the government says its major rivers are badly polluted, leaving hundreds of millions of people without enough clean drinking water.

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[greenman3610]

1. China - the environmental wildcard

There are only about 60 gold-standard green buildings in the world - that is, buildings certified by the U.S. Green Building Council as having been made with the materials and systems that best reduce waste, emissions and energy use. One of those buildings is in Beijing - China's Ministry of Science and Technology, at 55 Yuyuantan Nanlu Street.
http://www.pekingduck.org/archives/003101.php



http://www.worldwatch.org/features/chinawatch/stories/20060106-1
<b>Maturing Environmental Movement Takes Uniquely Chinese Approach</b>

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003728.html
<b>The Greening of China</b>
California's Million Solar Roof initiative may have been put on hold, but Shanghai's more modest Hundred Thousand Solar Roof project is well underway.

http://worldchanging.com/archives/003974.html
...my favorite way to look at these disasters is as an opportunity for greed to clean up our act. Over the weekend, the International Herald Tribune published a fascinating article covering companies and investment funds that view China as a growth market for energy-efficient technologies and other environmentally positive goods and services.

...The IHT led me to the FE Clean Energy Group, an investment group currently setting up a fund in Asia valued at $75 million. FE Clean Energy is interesting because the closer you look at the company, the more you understand that it has been set up specifically to profit from global warming. Its business plan seems largely predicated on funding projects that are not only profitable in the short term, simply as good businesses, but that, down the line, will also generate potentially valuable carbon dioxide emission credits.


lots more, go to
worldchanging.com,
search china, environment
and surf your brains out.

recommended!!!

[sam sarrha]

2. the major cause of death in China is Environmental pollution

[jpak]

3. China today is what the US was in 1969

and what America would look like today if it weren't for all them libril environmentalist wackos...

I think they needs theyselves a little Earth Day over there...

:)

[NNadir]

4. Actually China is 0.6 as much damage as the US now.

The damage that China does to the earth's atmosphere is 60% the damage done by the United States, this in spite of the fact that China has a vastly larger population.

China contributed roughly 3.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the earth's atmosphere at the same time that the United States contributed 5.8 billion tons.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tableh1co2.xls

Many people are waking up to the long understood fact that carbon dioxide is a very dangerous form of waste and that nobody knows what to do about it.

In fact, on a per capita basis, Chinese contribution to the current global climate change catastrophe is more than 7 times as small as the American contribution:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tableh1cco2.xls

Americans may feel that they are entitled to such a vast discrepancy in the use of resources - maybe because they went to a bunch of "feel good" demonstrations about the environment back in the 1970's - but viewed on an ethical basis, there is no rational basis for such a claim.

In fact, the US is the worst polluter on the planet, and it citizens have very little for which to congratulate themselves. The fact that Americans outsource a large portion of their pollution - especially from manufacturing operations and oil drilling and pumping operations - makes the situation even worse. Ironically some of this outsourcing is to China. Yes, indeed, some of that belching smoke goes to supply goods to the United States. Americans live totally by the NIMBY credo that if they can't see it in their neighborhood, it isn't happening.

I can't conceive of why anyone would imagine that the Chinese should look to the United States for environmental advice.

The situation in China may seem more readily apparent because of Chinese population density, but the fact is that on a planetary scale the nation the world could best do without in the current crisis is the United States. If everyone in the United States died next week, once the bodies of this particular set of rapacious consumers had finished rotting, the world would have reduced the magnitude of the global climate change crisis by 25%.

[jpak]

5. LOL!!!

I used 6.6 gallons of gasoline and 127 kWh of electricity last month (I keep track of these things).

People that cry crocodile tears over the "collapsing atmosphere" use much much more than that...and for some reason feel morally superior to "Greenpeace Twits" who actually DO something about it.

:)

[NNadir]

6. I don't know what your electric bill has to do with China's GHG output.

My post was about China and its per capita Greenhouse output, which is lower than that of the United States, much lower.

We can, I bet, find individual Americans who have very low energy consumption. For instance many homeless people consume almost no electricity, and burn no gasoline. Some people ride bicycles to work, because they live close to their jobs, and some work in home offices.

However, the average data shows that Americans have no moral authority to lecture China on environmental issues.

Americans are a self absorbed people, some of whom think that their own experience is somehow global or that they know what other people do. One of the easiest things one can do is to get Americans to claim moral superiority over anyone they don't like or with whom they don't agree. Actually Americans are tremendous hypocrites and basically they are mostly notable for denying their own responsibility and claiming nobility where it doesn't exist, as in "China should have an 'Earth Day' to be environmentally noble like us."

This sort of stuff is always those who will drive 500 km in an SUV fully loaded with expensive camping equipment to climb a mountain to "commune with nature." (This sort of image comprises many types of SUV ads in fact.)

Here's an indication of the sort of things that happen when people unspoiled places to celebrate their environmentalism. These photographs are from Antarctica, where people go, dragging oil drums with them to measure the "unspoiled" places:

[jpak]

7. LOLOLOL!!!!

There's something called the Antarctic Treaty...

Nobody "carries oil drums" to Antarctica any more - and everything that goes down there comes back - and I mean everything.

When I was at Palmer Station we recycled every scrap of paper, wood, plastic and metal generated (there were shipping containers for each class of material). All of it was sold to recyclers in Chile.

All used chemicals and radioisotopes were accounted for and stored on site - every last µl and µCi of it - and it's extensively documented.

Every 2 years or so they ship this stuff back to the US aboard a research icebreaker. I have used these cruises to study global-scale effects of ultraviolet light on marine organisms and seawater photochemistry. The National Science Foundation was very supportive of these expeditions as the ships would have been scientifically "idle" otherwise...(and we got some eye-popping data out of them too...)

:)

[NNadir]

8. And those wind powered clipper ships must be a thrill to take down there

too.

Every person I personally know who has been to Antarctica is a complete waste, which is not to say that all people who expend resources to work in Antarctica are complete wastes, just that the ones I know are complete wastes. I really don't think of these people as scientists so much as tourists, but that's just my opinion.

The fact is that greenhouse gases are used to bring these people down there to do whatever it is they do, from counting the used pipet tips to emptying their septic tanks.

Of course Antarctic research has been important to the field of atmospheric chemistry, but from what I can see, some of the crap that goes on down there is just garbage generating circle jerking. This is especially true when one considers the energy implications of shipping crap to Antarctica and then trucking it out again, which certainly accounts for the release of ton quantities of carbon dioxide, as does the heating, feeding and water melting that must go on down there to support the researchers. Somehow I don't think all that is managed on six gallons of gas a month.

It's a long commute, in fact, US to Antarctica and back, and one would hope that the expenditure of resources to go there would involve more consideration that preventing the idle state of icebreakers. I suppose that in any circumstance, one must take the wheat with the chaff, but again, my personal experience with Antarctic travelers leaves me very unimpressed from a cost/benefit standpoint. Even though much of humanity has benefited from Antarctic research, as well I know, all of that impressive research has been done by people with whom I have no personal experience.

By the way, I have no interest in what you do or the µCi quantities of radioactive materials about which you are so alternately obsessed and so proud. I have a sense of the quality of what you do and of the quality with which you think. Thus I'm sure what you find "eye-popping" would leave me less than astounded. The less said about that, the better.

I really don't give a flying fuck about your elaborate accounting of µCi of radioactivity either. It actually happens that the escape of a few microcuries of tritium isn't something to turn the world upside down about, and the matter is of little gravity or import. The quantity of tritium in the earth's atmosphere from the influx of cosmic rays dwarfs the impact of tritium on laboratory pipet tips, and the elaborate accounting, from my perspective is probably just a waste of paper that has to be transported great distances.

I note that every damn smoke detector in the United States has about a microcurie of radioactivity, however hundred millions of them there are in the United States, and no, you don't have to truck it back to Home Depot so they can truck it to Chile for processing. You don't have to account for it, either, since the risk is so low. (The benefits of the lives saved from fires is, on the other hand, high.) I also note that no one needs to know a damn thing about radiation, nuclear chemistry, nuclear physics or nuclear power to handle a smoke detector. Now it happens that I know each Beq of decay in Am-241 releases 5.438 MeV of energy, compared to, say, 0.019 MeV per decay of tritium, and I know what that means, but the clerks at Home Depot do not. Therefore the clerks at Home Depot are not especially qualified to comment on nuclear power even though they "work with" radiation as part of their job. In saying this, I am not maligning the clerks, but I simply note that clerks are clerks.

http://www.uic.com.au/nip35.htm

[jpak]

9. LOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!

A DU Classic....and bookmarked.

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl::rofl: :rofl::rofl: :rofl::rofl: :rofl::rofl: :rofl::rofl: :rofl::rofl: :rofl::rofl: :rofl::rofl: :rofl::rofl: :rofl::rofl: :rofl::rofl: :rofl::rofl: :rofl::rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

[NNadir]

10. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

I wish I could say that the subtlety and wit of your responses inspired me to bookmark something you say, but one can find many, many, many posts here at DU that consist entirely of LOL and smileys. As I note frequently, I've been listening to the other shit for years and years and years and for at least two decades I have been noting just how distant these repetitious chants are from reality. The people from who I hear about the grand renewable future change from year to year to year to year, from decade to decade, but basically the "solar will save us" refrain sounds exactly the same in 2006 as it did in 1996 as it did in 1986 as it did in 1976, the same conditional clauses included, "if, could" out the butt (if all the wind energy in North Dakota could be captured..."), and of course absurdly confident (given the measured performance) futuristic comments will ("by 2050, 9 brazillion percent of US energy demand will be met with wind, PV, etc.")

Oh well, even good posters sometimes lack creativity; one shouldn't expect much from weaker posters.

It is unusual, of course, to find too many posters, even in the Lounge, whose entire repertoire of posts consist largely of smileys and LOLⁿ and rehashing of thirty year old cliches from fantasy novels, but then again, the majority of posters at DU have subtle minds, think, reason, and know something about that of which they speak, and therefore are generally able to punctuate their LOL's, etc with substantive remarks. We have many people here whose writing is remarked for its eloquence and wit - as people sometimes note - and the pleasure of reading such remarks far outweighs the tedious crap through which one must wade to get to it.

As long as we know who is who, I am satisfied.