See instructions and format at the beginning of the first week's thread.
Consumption as an Infrastructure Theme:
1.
Case Study: The Introduction of Genetically Modified Crops (GM-crops) against market desires
In this lecture, Jeffrey Smith, author of Seeds of Deception, summarizes the contents of his book, which explains how genetically modified foods cause health problems, and their potential for creating a vast array of unforeseen and surprising illnesses. He also sheds light on how the [raw material regime] corruption within the U.S. government, the FDA, and the GMO industry has allowed, and perpetuated, the cover-up.
59 min 57 sec
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2108022965800005689&hl=en
2.
Electronic Trash Village - China
The U.N. estimates that China imports 70% of electronic trash/waste of the entire world. The U.S. is the largest trash exporter of electronic waste. The film goes undercover in a city in southern China where approximately 250,000 people process the world's electronic trash--documenting the infrastructural flow to them as well as their health problems and the economic problems leading them into these jobs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHTWRYXy2gE (10:29)
3.
THE CORPORATION [17/23] Unsettling Accounts
http://youtube.com/watch?v=eZkDikRLQrw
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7 comments:
1. Mark Whitaker
2. Good demonstration of how scarcity (real or artificial) makes the consumptive infrastructure very clear--and makes a raw material regime clear! This article has both!
3. On the infrastructure issue, I put in boldface lots of quotes related to thinking about consumption as an infrastructure. This small town in Tennessee in the USA has been featured on the national news there several times. It seems to be because it is such a clear visual and visceral image: a mayor having the power to turn on or off the whole community's tap water during a long drought. Think consumption as an infrastructure.
On the 'Raw Material Regime': What is NOT CLEARLY NOTED in the article is that the greatest water use in the USA is not individual consumption. It is thermoelectric power plants that consume more than 50% of the USA's water! Georgia Power and Southern Company utilities in the politics of many southern states are seen very clearly as influencing the consumptive infrastructural decisions about their states--and even their public science discoures. I put those sections in boldface as well to help you focus on the raw material regime issues mentioned.
On U.S. Water Use:
http://nationalatlas.gov/articles/water/a_wateruse.html
Here's the summary chart/image for you.
Thermoelectric power is mostly to blame for a lot of water use in the USA. Then monocrop agriculture. What is interesting is that the news is constructing this as an individual water conservation issue--when major corporate energy generators are the larger (mostly silent) water users.
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Published on Thursday, November 15, 2007 by The Independent/UK
The Big Thirst: The Great American Water Crisis
by Leonard Doyle
The US drought is now so acute that, in some southern communities, the water supply is cut off for 21 hours a day.
In Chattanooga, Tennessee, a once-lush region where the American dream has been reduced to a single four-letter word: rain.
On Dancing Fern Mountain, in the hills above Chattanooga, Tennessee, two brothers worry about a beaver dam which is blocking access to the only fresh water supply for miles. "The dam is ruining the water and every time we tear it down, the beaver builds it again," says Larry Fulfer. "People don't think we should, but we're gonna have to get that critter and kill him."
With a slap of his tail, the beaver disappears. His dam is at the mouth of a vast underground cave system, where enough pure spring
water emerges to supply the half-a-dozen families who live on Dancing Fern Mountain. "This drought has turned us into hillbillies," says Larry's brother, Brian, with evident disgust. "All we want is water in our taps."
Ten miles away, darkness is falling over the mountain village of Orme as Tony Reames, the volunteer mayor, drives up a dusty track for an important nightly ritual. He is turning on the water supply for a couple of hours.
These days, the plight of the village of Orme makes the national television news.
And as the mayor drives up the hill for half a mile he is followed by a crocodile of gleaming 4×4s and rental cars, carrying among them a crew from the Weather Channel, Fox News, ABC News and The Independent. Under the glare of the television arc lamps, Mayor Reames solemnly opens the spigot.
It is a daily task that has turned him into a symbol of global warming. The sight of a small village trying to cope without water for 21 hours a day has touched something in the national psyche.
A few years ago, Orme, like the rest of the normally lush southeast, had plenty of water. But a powerful waterfall which supplied the village has been bone dry for more than two years. Water in the wells is now sulphurous and undrinkable, thanks to the drought.
All around, the old mining village is surrounded by hills covered in a canopy of trees, their leaves changing colour in the autumn chill. It is strange to think of a mountain village running out of water, but the mayor believes the trees are dying a slow death because there's been a lack of water for more than two years in a row. "The leaves are later every year, I don't see how they can survive much longer without rain," he says.
He takes his role as guardian of the village's meagre water supply very seriously. At the appointed moment, and with a look of deep concentration, he turns a 4ft rusty lever, sending water spilling down the pipes to the village below. All at once householders run showers and washing machines and collect drinking water. And as Mayor Reames turns his lever, reporters press their microphones up against the valve to record the gurgling flow. Then they race down the valley to interview people doing the washing up.
What they find is a picture of shocking rural poverty.
In one clapboard house, John Anderson is helping out his arthritic mother. He stands surrounded by jugs of water as camera crews wait in line to ask him over and over how it feels to have water in the tap for a couple of hours. "It's been pretty hard all summer," he says, "and it's not getting any easier."
Three days a week, a volunteer fire chief drives a mile down the road to the Alabama state line in a 1961 fire truck where he meets another truck and pumps about 20,000 gallons of water for Orme's tank. As news of the town's predicament worsens, more and more communities are offering water. On Tuesday the mayor of another Alabama town came by to offer as much water as they needed, without charge.
In a couple of weeks' time, relief will come to Orme and its 120 residents when a water pipe is finally connected to a neighbouring community. Mayor Reames applied for and secured a federal grant to pay for it.
The half-inch pipeline should ensure the continued survival of the tiny former mining village, which came close to dying thanks to the worst drought in 100 years.
Many rural communities are suffering as the drought tightens its grip across a wide region, which includes much of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Florida. Here in scenic southern Tennessee, the drought is adding to the problems of extreme rural poverty.
At a highway rest stop for tourists - near a bridge named for Senator Albert Gore Sr, a Tennesseean and father of Nobel laureate Al Gore Jr - the toilets are closed for lack of water.
In a nearby town, the mayor orders the grass regularly mown on the exposed banks of a reservoir that until recently was below water.
From the air the impact of the drought is most obvious. The mighty Tennessee and Chattahoochee rivers have been reduced to narrow channels of muddy brown water.
Sandbanks and islands have appeared and old tree stumps now poke out of lakes and reservoirs as the water level falls.
The government's "drought monitor" says that 32 per cent of the region is in "exceptional drought", its most severe designation. The first five months of this year were the driest in 118 years of record-keeping by the Tennessee Valley authority.
And adding to the problem is the region's booming population, combined with a political culture that preaches against government regulation and denies the very existence of global warming. The drought is now hurting Atlanta, a city boasting one of the worst environmental records in the US and whose political masters are among the least enlightened when it comes to climate change [and likely cultural change...].
Atlanta is teeming with Fortune 500 companies - including Coca Cola - and growing rapidly.
But the city's three million residents also endure some of the worst air quality in the country from poorly regulated smokestack
industries.
Thanks to profligate water consumption and drought, they may have no drinking water at all by January as the city's only source of drinking water, Lake Lanier, is running critically low. The reservoir's water must be shared by three neighbouring states.
Soon the level will be lower than when it was built in the 1950s.
On Tuesday, with Bibles and crucifixes held aloft, hundreds of church ministers, lawmakers, unemployed landscapers and office workers, swayed and linked arms in a special prayer service for rain outside the Georgia Capitol. A choir sang "What a Mighty God We Serve" and "Amazing Grace".
Sonny Perdue, governor of Georgia and chief global warming sceptic, cut a newly repentant figure as he publicly prayed for a downpour.
He even acknowledged that the drought was a man-made, as well as natural, problem. Georgians, he said, had not done "all we could do in conservation".
Then bowing his head, he said: "We have come together, very simply, for one reason and one reason only: To very reverently and respectfully pray up a storm."
But despite the looming catastrophe, and the publicity surrounding Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental campaigning, the issue of global warming gets little consideration in these parts. Georgia's state assembly recently organised a climate change summit in which three of the four experts invited were global-warming sceptics.
"It's very backward here," says Patty Durand, head of the Georgia branch of the Sierra Club, one of the largest environmental groups in the US. "It also has to do with money as almost all the politicians here are funded by big polluting industry.
There is little awareness of the environmental impact of industry. In spite of the drought, Georgia now wants to build a new coal-powered plant that will suck away another 25 million extra gallons of water and pour ever more carbon into the atmosphere. They just don't get it."
One reason environmentalists give for the state's poor record is Southern Company, a huge electrical utility that wields huge influence all the way to the White House.
More than any other company, Southern has been responsible for steering President George Bush away from action to halt global warming.
It has done so by spreading largesse - $8m (£4m) on contributions to politicians in the past nine years, an amount far outweighing the political contributions of any other utility.
As a method of controlling US environmental policy, it has proved highly effective.
On Tuesday, voters in Mississippi re-elected Republican Governor Haley Barbour, a backslapping former lobbyist of Southern Company.
"The White House is not the only one being influenced by the smokestack crowd," says Frank O' Donnell, head of Clean Air Watch. He points out that Sonny Perdue has received large campaign contributions from Southern executives and even hired his
chief of staff from its subsidiary, Georgia Power.
"The company has an unrivalled impact on America's lack of a national policy on global warming," says Mr O'Donnell, "and the coal-burning lobby doesn't seem to care much about the general public, so single-minded is it on building more pollution-creating plants at the expense of climate change."
After two years of blue skies, entire crops have died in the fields, and expensive lawns are turning brown thanks to sprinkler bans. The state's leaders are also bickering, with Mr Perdue threatening to go to court to reduce the amount of water sent south from Lake Lanier to Florida. The water flow - here as elsewhere in the US - is managed by the US Army Corps of Engineers, which releases one billion gallons of water a day from the lake.
The Army has to provide enough to supply drinking water for Atlanta, to irrigate crops, cool several coal-fired electricity generating plants in the US and provide water for industry.
It is also obliged by federal law to ensure enough reaches Florida to keep protected species alive, including two freshwater mussels and the Florida sturgeon, which are in danger of extinction.
After a bitter round of arguments between the three states and the Army this week, the amount of water flowing to Florida's Apalachicola river was cut by 16 per cent while the Fish and Wildlife Service assesses whether the mussels will survive.
Governor Perdue may have won round one at the expense of the freshwater mussel and the sturgeon - but in the absence of prolonged rain, the region's problems are far from over.
Next week, on Thanksgiving, there will be an even bigger media circus in the village of Orme as the freshly piped water is finally turned on.
The village will then return to the obscurity to which it has long grown accustomed since its coalmines closed down in the late 1930s.
"It's real quiet around here and that's how we like it," says Mayor Reames. "But yet so much has changed. As young boys we used to ride up to the waterfall on our ponies and take showers in the summertime.
Something dramatic has happened to the climate and it's beyond our control.
"In a few weeks we will have water here. But what's going to happen to Atlanta where millions of people are running out of water? What are they going to do if the rains don't come?"
--- http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/15/5255/
Certainly, they will have to adapt their infrastructure for getting water some other way...
Will the major raw material regime water users in the USA (energy makers like coal-fired energy plants and nuclear power plants, etc.) let these southern states tackle the issue directly?
You can even note the biased 'state-science' and 'science-consumption' relationship issues of the raw material regime above when a majority of climate change skeptics were invited to that industry-held public relations conference on the issue--funded by the CO2 generating power utilities.
1.Carbon Pollution rises again
2.Min Sook Kim
3.It is depressing to hear the carbon pollution rises again, but good to know there is a hope if industrialized countries follow the policies to meet their Kyoto targets. I wonder what more should have done to make the US and China wake up and help the earth’s future, actually their future too. Here is the latest report:
----------------------------------
Carbon pollution from industrialised countries rises again
by Richard Ingham
Tue Nov 20, 8:00 AM ET
Emissions of greenhouse gases by industrialised countries are surging anew after a long decline, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) said on Tuesday ahead of a crucial forum on tackling global warming.
It blamed continued growth in Western economies and a revival of growth in former East Bloc nations, with pollution from transport the biggest culprit by sector.
"Industrialised countries' overall greenhouse-gas emissions rose to a near all-time high in 2005," UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer said in a press conference telecast from Bonn.
"Greenhouse-gas emissions between 1990 and 2000 went down, but then between 2000 and 2005 they increased again, by 2.6 percent."
2005 is the latest year for which the 40 industrialised countries which have signed and ratified the UNFCCC have reported their emissions data, under their obligations to this treaty.
The data released on Tuesday comes on the heels of a grim warning by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
At the weekend, the Nobel-winning IPCC issued a historic report that declared climate change was already visible and could wreak "abrupt or irreversible" damage if unchecked.
Publication of the figures also coincides with the runup to a UNFCCC meeting in Bali, Indonesia, running from December 3-14.
That conference is tasked with setting down a two-year strategy of negotiations leading to a new pact to deepen curbs on greenhouse gases beyond 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol's current pledges expire.
Under the Protocol, only industrialised countries that have signed and ratified it are required to make targeted cuts in their emissions. Developing countries do not have these pledges.
The United States -- the world's biggest carbon polluter in 2005 but widely tipped to be overtaken by China in 2007 -- remains outside the Kyoto Protocol.
It signed the pact in 1997 but has refused to ratify it, although it remains a member of Kyoto's parent treaty, the UNFCCC.
De Boer clarified a UNFCCC press release that had said emissions by the convention's industrialised countries, the so-called "Annex 1" countries, had broken records in 2005. "It is at a near all-time high, not an all-time high," he said.
Here are the report's main points:
-- By the end of 2005, the United States emitted 16.3 percent more greenhouse gases than in 1990. Australia, the other industrialised Kyoto holdout, was 25.6 percent above the 1990 benchmark.
-- Emissions by Russia rose to 2.3 billion tonnes in 2005 from 2.09 billion in 2004.
-- Overall, Kyoto's Annex 1 countries are projected to achieve reductions of 10.8 percent by 2012 over 1990 levels. Under the Protocol, the Annex 1 group is committed to a five percent cut as a whole.
-- This 10.8-percent cut depends on the Annex 1 countries implementing all their promised policies and measures and factoring in the collapse of carbon-spewing industries in Central and Eastern Europe. Green groups brand this latter calculation an accountancy trick.
-- Within the European Union (EU), which is Kyoto's big champion, only four countries of the pre-enlargement EU-15 (Britain, France, Germany and Sweden) are on course for meeting their 2012 targets without additional measures. Portugal, Ireland, Austria, Italy and Spain were already as much as three times over their Kyoto ceiling in 2005.
De Boer pointed to a burst of activity in 2006 in two Kyoto innovations -- the market in carbon emissions, launched by the EU, and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), in which rich countries get carbon "credits" if they offset pollution in poorer countries.
"Emissions trends around the world and especially in industrialised countries are worrying," he said.
"But countries are beginning to put policies in place in order to meet their Kyoto targets, and our assessment is that those are robust policies and measures that will seriously take countries towards achieving their goals."
De Boer set a triple benchmark to judge Bali's success.
"If there is a decision to launch negotiations, if an agenda for negotiations is agreed and if an end-date (for completing negotiations) is set, then I would consider Bali to be a success," he said.
"Anything less than that would be either short of success or a failure.”
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/unclimatewarmingemissions;_ylt=Aj8eR58athjm0u7ji_ObbB.s0NUE
1. Peaches Park
2. Madagascar's Sapphires
3. I guess when you hear something as sad as this, you want to blame someone. Environmental Sociology makes me see this world as a selfish, greedy, conniving place. Which I guess it is. But It's also a place of great beauty and wealth. When you find a country with such abundant natural resources, you see a mess of politics and powers. It makes me question why I would ever need a diamond or sapphire engagement ring..if our cultural norm is fueling a community of death and violence, maybe it's partly our responsibility.
Madagascar's sapphire rush
By Jonny Hogg
BBC News, Madagascar
The town of Ilakaka in Madagascar did not exist 10 years ago, but now people are flocking there in search of sapphires.
Sapphire mine
Madagascar has one of the largest gem stone deposits on the planet
As a result, it has a reputation for being one of the most dangerous places in the country.
I was doing fine until Jean Noel asked me why I would risk my life to report on Ilakaka.
I must say I had not particularly thought of it like that.
He then pulled out a pistol, showed it to me and told me cheerily that I was perfectly safe.
Guns in the hands of civilians are not a common sight in Madagascar.
But then this is Ilakaka and it seems that things work a little bit differently here.
It was back in 1998 that the discovery of major sapphire deposits in the hot and rocky plains of the island's southern interior sparked an extraordinary scramble for wealth.
Ilakaka and the surrounding region now accounts for around 50% of the world's sapphires.
Almost overnight, a collection of huts - which had acted as little more than a truck stop - grew into a thriving mining town.
Everyone is an outsider here.
Rampant capitalism
The people who were drawn to the town have brought a taste of home with them.
Children holding gemstones
Children who I thought were innocently swimming return from the river with handfuls of sapphires
Asia sits side by side with Madagascar and, turning down one road, I find myself in Africa, or at least Ilakaka's African quarter.
The main road is a riot of ramshackle market stalls, casinos and bars, interspersed with gleaming new offices where the stones are bought and sold.
The word sapphire is everywhere - on walls, signs and shop-fronts.
From its dramatic conception, the town has become a showcase for entrepreneurial spirit and rampant capitalism.
Children, who I thought were innocently swimming, return from the river clutching handfuls of sapphires, which can be simply sifted from the mud on its bed.
Living with violence
Everyone here wants to make a fortune and they are prepared to live in a town where, despite a high police presence, violence is rife.
Town of Ilakaka
An estimated 70% of Malagasy live on less than $1 per day
Jean Noel, one of the founding fathers of Ilakaka, estimates that between 20 and 30 people are murdered each year in a town whose population numbers perhaps 20,000.
Only the week before, a businessman was gunned down in his hotel room after buying a valuable stone.
According to Jean Noel, the violence is getting worse. So, I ask Mr Noel, how does he stay safe?
Mr Noel is in fact Malagasy royalty. His grandfather was a prince of the Antandroy tribe in the south of the island.
But this gives him more than just a sense of familial pride and the cool, benevolent authority he displays towards everyone he meets.
It also - due to Madagascar's traditions of respect and kinship - gives him a degree of protection. But only a degree.
After he had finished buttoning his shirt so that only a slight bulge showed that he was carrying a gun, we headed to his mine site, close to the town centre.
It is a great gash in the sandy, orange earth which snakes its way through the ground as the miners try to locate each new deposit of sapphires beneath the surface.
It is perhaps 12m deep and 20m wide. In the next three weeks Mr Noel hopes they will hit sapphires again.
It is a gamble of course, but it seems that Ilakaka is full of chancers.
After all, the stakes are high.
Apparently the stone the businessman was killed for was worth £15,000 ($30,000).
Baptism of fire
The question remains, why does the violence persist here?
Map of Madagascar
I spoke to Ilakaka's police chief, Philibert Andrianony. Young and energetic, he speaks openly about the challenges of policing the area.
He is also very new to the job and had a baptism of fire when, in his first two weeks, there were two murders.
I asked him why the police cannot stop the blood-letting.
Firstly, he told me, they lack equipment.
They have no radios, no 4x4s to negotiate the appalling roads that weave between the mine sites.
The police are even less well armed than the bandits they battle.
More worryingly, Mr Andrianony also admits that some of his own officers collaborate with the bandits.
Poor police salaries and the lure of illegal riches have blurred the line between lawbreaker and law enforcer.
"It's not acceptable, but it's their choice," Mr Andrianony says.
Danger is bad for business
Mr Noel is also worried about the insecurity. He says it is slowing development.
The individual fortune-hunters are no longer arriving in such numbers, put off by the danger.
Increasingly, the sapphire markets are being dominated by Indians, Sri Lankans and Thais, who can afford to protect themselves.
But Mr Noel still believes passionately in Ilakaka's future.
Yet it seems that the town that came from nowhere is going nowhere.
I ask the driver if we can stay so I could experience Ilakaka by night.
He politely replies that experience is one thing but getting killed is quite another, so no, we cannot stay.
As we pulled out of the town and Ilakaka's macho energy slipped behind us, I had to agree with Mr Noel.
The sapphires are still there and so is the dream of getting rich.
Still, it is a strange place and I will not easily forget the long lingering stare I got as a man, surrounded by guards and carrying a pistol, left a shop and got into his car.
As they pulled away, he coolly held my gaze. I must confess I looked away first.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7098213.stm
1. SuJung,Kim
2. Jellyfish swarm hits Scotland prompting warnings
3. Slowly but surely, climate change show its symptoms. Jelly fish which looks like funny threatened ecosystem in the ocean as a symbol of warm water.
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LONDON (Reuters) - Millions of stinging baby jellyfish have been spotted off Scotland just days after another swarm wiped out Northern Ireland's only Salmon farm, the Marine Conservation Society said on Friday.
The organization, which said the abnormal swarms of baby mauve stinger and compass jellyfish were due to wind and tidal factors, urged fish farmers and the public to report any sightings to help monitor their progress.
"It is quite unusual for this number of juvenile jellyfish to be occurring in UK waters at this time of year," said Anne Saunders, MCS Scottish Projects Officer.
"But these blooms are phenomenal and consist of millions of individuals, being washed here by strong Atlantic currents."
Compass jellyfish are common in British waters during the summer, but mauve stingers are relatively uncommon.
In recent years the mauve stinger has bloomed in vast numbers in the Mediterranean, forming a major bathing hazard.
"Jellyfish swarms can impact on fish and shellfish farms, and while the conditions causing these current events remain unclear, such swarms may become more prevalent in Scottish waters as a result of climate change," Saunders said.
(Reporting by Jeremy Lovell; editing by Elizabeth Piper)
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http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/25730
1. se kyoung
2. Navel base to be constructe on Jeju island.
3. I heared the s.korean Navy is planning to build a naval base on beautiful Jeju island. The groundbreaking is pxpected to take place aroung June 2009. Funny thing is Jeju is designated to cultural heritage by U.N. and we are making a naval base on it. People living in that area have been conflicted for several months and it is getting worse that before. This conflict is processing in a similar way of the case from saemangem(새만금, sea wall). That makes me sad.
Anyway, korean media is not dealing with that issue now, but i think we should our eyes keep on it.
if u want more information, go and visit 한겨레21.
http://www.hani.co.kr/section-021005000/2007/06/021005000200706140664017.html
1. YingQi Fan
2. China’s energy status quo
3. This is a very good article as to the status quo on China’s energy. China’s dependence on the coal-fired makes itself to rank 2nd, of which country emit most greenhouse gases. But according to the current situation, it’s hard for China to change greatly, even though she signed for the Kyoto Protocol and there are not much time left for it to meet the obligation. Just as “the Electronic Trash Village – China” shows, every year 35 million tonnes of electronic waste is exported to China to be scrapped. A lot of developed countries transferred the highly polluted corporation like steel industries from their own countries to China. On the other side, the high profits made it hard for China to say no to them. Environment or GDP? That’s the problem.
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China’s Green Energy Gap
BOXING, China — By next autumn, a muddy construction site here in a rural part of eastern China will give way to a small power plant that burns corn stalks and cotton stalks to generate electricity for nearby villages and steam for a neighboring industrial complex.
The plant would be ready sooner, but only four companies in China make the specialized precision boilers that the biomass plant requires. And all those companies are plagued by backed-up orders and delivery delays. Similar problems bedevil the wind turbine industry in China.
The same big utility company building the green plant in Boxing, CLP, has just opened a coal-fired plant in southernmost China. On schedule and built for half what it would cost in the West, that plant will generate 1,200 megawatts of electricity — compared with 6 megawatts from the Boxing biomass plant. CLP is so impressed that it is bidding to build coal-fired plants in India with Chinese technology.
These are the realities faced by companies seeking to make themselves more environmentally friendly in China, where coal is king. Coal-fired plants are quick and cheap to build and easy to run. While the Chinese government has set goals for increasing the use of a long list of alternative energies — including wind, biomass, hydroelectric, solar and nuclear — they all face obstacles, from bureaucracy to bottlenecks in manufacturing. CLP’s differing energy choices are a case study in how one company grapples with the need to provide electricity to hundreds of millions of impoverished Asians even as it is under a self-imposed goal of trying to limit emissions of global warming gases.
Controlled by the Kadoorie family — one of Hong Kong’s wealthiest, with a long history of supporting environmental causes — CLP’s board began considering a plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions on Tuesday.
While the details are still being worked out, the company plans to commit itself to “material and dramatic reductions” in such emissions in industrialized countries like Australia, while seeking to control growth in emissions in developing countries, like China, said Andrew Brandler, CLP’s chief executive.
“We think the world has to address the issue of climate change as a matter of urgency,” Mr. Brandler said.
Yet CLP’s operations are growing so quickly in China, India and other developing countries in response to soaring electricity demand that Mr. Brandler said the company’s total emissions of global warming gases may actually increase in the short term.
The problem is particularly acute because governments across Asia, from China and India to Indonesia and the Philippines, are turning mainly to coal to meet their soaring electricity needs and prevent blackouts, even though coal produces more global warming gases than any other major source of electricity.
China’s increase has been the most substantial. The country built 114,000 megawatts of fossil-fuel-based generating capacity last year alone, almost all coal-fired, and is on course to complete 95,000 megawatts more this year.
For comparison, Britain has 75,000 megawatts in operation, built over a span of decades.
The most talked-about alternative to coal in China involves plans to quadruple the country’s share of power from nuclear energy by 2020. But the plan, which contemplates dozens of reactors, still amounts to just 31,000 megawatts of nuclear power over the next dozen years.
“That’s minuscule,” said Jonathan Sinton, a China expert at the International Energy Agency. China builds more coal-fired capacity than that every four months.
Two big questions linger over even those modest goals: can equipment be manufactured for dozens of nuclear reactors, and can China train enough workers to run them?
At CLP’s Daya Bay nuclear plant in Shenzhen, a house-sized dome of specially hardened steel sat next to an immense crane one recent morning, waiting to be swung and bolted into position as part of the site’s sixth reactor.
But at least Daya Bay’s dome is here — reactors elsewhere in China wait up to several years. Only a handful of steel mills around the world can cast the thick domes, and only now are the first two mills in China taking delivery of equipment to make them.
The plant’s 1,750 employees, meanwhile, are training 500 interns at a time, according to Stephen Lau, the first deputy general manager of the plant; the government-owned nuclear power company asked that 1,000 be trained at a time, but the joint venture running the plant could not handle that many.
By contrast, there is no shortage of workers to run coal-fired power plants. China is dotted with decrepit state-owned coal-fired plants that each employ 900 to 1,000 people to produce just 50 to 100 megawatts. The government frequently asks companies to close one of these inefficient, heavily polluting operations and provide jobs or money to the workers before allowing the construction of a new coal-fired plant.
CLP’s modern coal-burning plant in Fangchenggang in southernmost China — a pair of 260-foot gray towers looming over a tropical landscape of woods and emerald rice fields dotted by gray oxen — employs just 270 workers to generate 1,200 megawatts.
Before the Fangchenggang plant could be built, the local government had to buy the land from residents of a nearby fishing village, setting off discussions about whose land should be sacrificed, said Zhang Zhengde, a village elder.
“We would prefer to have a smaller site — if there were more land, it would disrupt our lives, and government compensation cannot solve that,” he said.
But coal’s problems are nothing compared with the challenges facing the wind-energy industry, which requires much more land and is troubled by years-long shortages of a wider range of parts, as well as contradictory regulatory policies. For instance, Beijing has mandated that power transmission companies pay at least 6.5 cents per kilowatt hour to buy wind-generated electricity from approved power producers, not much above the 4.5 cents an hour they pay for coal-generated power. But the premium is so small that only one-third of 1 percent of the nationally regulated wind power projects approved in 2004 have actually been built, and none of those approved in the last two years, said Vivek Kher, a spokesman for Suzlon Energy, an Indian manufacturer of wind turbines.
Some provincial governments have ordered payments of 8.1 cents for wind projects they regulate, he said, and these projects are being built.
Plans have slowed to expand the use of natural gas, which burns more cleanly and produces less greenhouse gas than coal or oil. It has proved costly and difficult to build pipelines from gas fields in western China, while liquefied natural gas for transport in ships is in short supply.
The future of hydroelectric power in China is clouded by severe environmental problems at the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.
One of the strangest features of China’s energy policy is the paucity of environmental controls on coal-fired plants, because rules governing them were written long ago. Renewable energy projects actually face a more stringent review of their environmental impact.
China has begun telling companies that build coal-fired plants that they should choose so-called supercritical technology. Such technology increases construction costs, but the plant then requires 10 percent less coal to run, reducing emissions and long-term costs.
CLP’s new coal-fired plant at Fangchenggang, near the Vietnamese border, uses supercritical technology. But it still produces considerably more global warming gases than burning natural gas, using nuclear power or turning to renewable energy sources like biomass.
Now CLP wants an international consensus on a broad successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which set some limits on greenhouse gas emissions through 2012. Clear limits on future emissions would force utilities to avoid projects that contribute to global warming, and, unlike Kyoto, might extend to more of Asia. Kyoto exempts developing countries like China and India from emissions limits.
One reason CLP seeks a new consensus is the bruising lesson it recently received. The company had proposed building a coal-fired plant in the Philippines employing supercritical technology and burning very low-sulfur coal, a more expensive but less polluting variety of coal.
In the end, though, the developer found an American private equity firm that was willing to bankroll a low-tech subcritical plant using a variety of coal that pollutes more, said Mr. Brandler, declining to identify the project or the participants. (Greenpeace officials said that they were also not aware of which project it might be among many in the Philippines.)
“You’ve got to get the rest of the industry to come along,” Mr. Brandler said. “That’s why we will be agitating more.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/business/worldbusiness/24power.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=environment
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