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Beneath Booming Cities, China’s Future Is Drying Up
Jim Yardley, New York Times
SHIJIAZHUANG, China — Hundreds of feet below ground, the water supply for this provincial capital of more than two million people is steadily running out. Municipal wells have already drained two-thirds of the local groundwater, and the water table is sinking fast.
Above ground, this city in the North China Plain is having a party. Economic growth topped 11 percent last year. Population is rising. One new upscale housing development is advertising waterfront property on lakes filled with pumped groundwater. Another half-built complex, the Arc de Royal, is rising above one of the lowest points in the city’s water table.
“People who are buying apartments aren’t thinking about whether there will be water in the future,” said Zhang Zhongmin, who has tried for the past 20 years to raise public awareness about the city’s dire water situation.
For three decades, water has been indispensable in sustaining the rollicking economic expansion that has made China a world power. Now, China’s galloping, often wasteful style of economic growth is pushing the country toward a water crisis. Water pollution is rampant nationwide, while water scarcity has worsened severely in north China — even as demand keeps rising everywhere.
China is scouring the world for oil, natural gas and minerals to keep its economic machine humming. But trade deals cannot solve water problems.
(27 September 2007)
China’s crude oil imports climb 18.7% in August on year
Chris Oliver, MarketWatch
China’s imports of crude oil climbed 18.7% in August from the same month a year earlier, the Chinese government said Monday. Crude oil imports totaled 14.04 million metric tones in August, equivalent to 3.32 million barrels a day, according to Dow Jones Newswires, which cited data published Monday by the General Administration of Customs.
(24 September 2007)
Contributor Jim writes:
A short blurb that got exactly the space you see above….despite its obvious importance as a trend as it relates to consumption and inevitable competition for remaining oil stocks.
Bund blackout sends powerful signal: save energy or face blackout
Shanghai Daily via Xinuanet
BEIJING — Shanghai’s Bund lost its dazzling shine for half an hour Sunday night when all landscape lighting outside the historical buildings went dark.
But it wasn’t an accident – the lights were switched off by state energy authorities to remind people what will happen if they don’t save energy as a matter of course.
The message was spread across eight cities in China, including Beijing, Harbin, Xi’an, Nanjing, Wuhan, Chongqing and Shenzhen. All turned off landscape lighting at scenic spots at 8 pm for 30 minutes.
In Shanghai, nearly 100 buildings along the Huangpu River had their lights turned off. The amount of electricity saved this way was not big – estimated to be around 1,400 kilowatt-hours and worth about 1,200 yuan (US$158).
“I felt a big loss when all the lights were turned off as the buildings disappeared in the darkness,” said Zhou Mengdi, a 15-year-old senior high school girl who is a member of her school’s energy conservation association.
Lighting along the Bund was turned off between 2003 and 2005, when the city was in the middle of a severe power shortage.
“This is just to let the public experience the impact of living without power and improve their energy-saving awareness,” said Lan Yujun, secretary general of the city’s energy conservation association.
In total the city has around 20,000 kilowatts of landscape lighting, half of which is run by the landscape lighting management center.
The city plans to reduce its energy consumption by 20 percent per unit of gross domestic product compared with consumption in 2005, when it used energy equivalent to 1.03 tons of coal for generation of every 100,000 yuan in GDP.
(24 September 2007)
Contributor www.peakaware.com writes:
Here is a good example of how to wake up the masses.
China Warns of Catastrophe from Three Gorges Dam
Reuters via Planet Ark
BEIJING – China’s huge Three Gorges Dam hydropower project could spark environmental catastrophe unless accumulating threats are quickly defused, senior officials and experts have warned.
The dam in southwest China, the world’s biggest hydropower project, has begun generating electricity and serving as a barrier against seasonal flooding threatening lower reaches of the Yangtze River, Xinhua news agency reported late on Tuesday, citing a forum of experts and officials.
But even senior dam officials who have often defended the project as an engineering wonder and ecological boon now warn that areas around the dam are paying a heavy, potentially calamitous environmental cost.
…Wang Xiaofeng, director of the administrative office in charge of building the dam, told the forum that it was time to face up to the environmental consequences of constructing the massive concrete wall across the country’s biggest river.
“We absolutely cannot relax our guard against ecological and environmental security problems sparked by the Three Gorges Project,” Wang told the meeting, according to Xinhua.
“We cannot win passing economic prosperity at the cost of the environment.”
Wang cited a litany of threats, especially erosion and landslides on steep hills around the dam, conflicts over land shortages and “ecological deterioration caused by irrational development”.
The strikingly frank acknowledgement of problems comes weeks before a congress of the ruling Communist Party that is set to consolidate policies giving more attention to environmental worries after decades of unfettered industrial growth.
(27 September 2007)
