Author Archives

Patricia Adams

Patricia Adams is an economist and the Executive Director of Probe International, an independent think-tank and watchdog over the environmental consequences of Canadian government and corporate activities around the world. Her books include In the Name of Progress: The Underside of Foreign Aid, (Doubleday 1985), and Odious Debts: Loose Lending, Corruption and the Third World”s Environmental Legacy (Earthscan 1991), which exposes the jeopardy of years of loose lending for both the Third World’s environment and their economies, and proposes a legal remedy to place responsibility for the Third World’s debt crisis on the parties involved, instead of on First and Third World taxpayers. Pat also edited the English language translation of Yangtze! Yangtze!, the extraordinary critique by Chinese experts of the Three Gorges dam that inspired the democracy movement when it was first published in 1989, led to the postponement of the dam, and was subsequently banned by Chinese authorities. Her books have been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Bahasa Indonesia.

Press Release: What have we learned? After Three Gorges Dam

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(March 27, 2012) Probe International is cosponsoring an upcoming two-day symposium on the impacts of the Three Gorges Dam with the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, at the University of California, Berkeley. The symposium will gather scientists and experts from China, and elsewhere, to discuss emerging problems with the world’s largest electricity-generating plant in order to mitigate harm and to inform future investments in China’s power sector. The symposium will be held on April 13th and 14th, at Wurster Hall, University of California, Berkeley.

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China, EU carbon markets bailed out at Durban

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(December 13, 2011) The Durban climate conference set out to save the planet, but in the end may only save China’s green energy industry and the EU’s carbon markets, both of which are in danger of freefall. The $100-billion a year Green Climate Fund, agreed to by the conference, will finance the global spread of Chinese technologies. And the EU’s unilateral decision to extend Kyoto will help prop up its faltering carbon markets. But beyond December 2012, when the current Kyoto Protocol ends, the EU will be on its own as Canada, Japan, and Russia have declared their intention to withdraw.

Dam postponement seen as rebuke to Beijing

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Myanmar’s announced cancellation of the Myitsone dam on the Irrawaddy River has brought long-standing tensions with China into the open – including setting off conflicts with the Kachin Independence Organization in the north of the country. “It may be that the Myanmar government sees Chinese investment, in particular the Myitsone dam, as a destabilising force,” said Patricia Adams.

The Yangtze runs dry

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(August 18, 2011) “The Yangtze River will run dry” because engineers have gone wild, building so many dams that the amount of water needed to fill all the reservoirs along the Yangtze would exceed the flow of the river. So says “A Mighty River Runs Dry,” a new study by geologist Fan Xiao of the Sichuan Geology and Mineral Bureau in China. Because there isn’t enough water in the Yangtze to fill all the dams to their designed capacity during the impoundment period each year, “an enormous waste of money” will result, with potentially staggering losses to China’s economy, 40 per cent of which comes from agriculture, fishing, industry and shipping along the Yangtze.

Nationalizing China

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(June 24, 2011) China is heading for a degree of government ownership and central planning unseen since Mao’s passing. This Financial Post article by Probe International’s Patricia Adams looks at the advance of the state at the expense of China’s private sector and its foreign competition. In fact, she notes, western companies – feeling unwanted – are beginning to pull up stakes in China. And that suits China just fine.

Controversial Three Gorges dam has problems, admits China

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(May 19, 2011) The world’s largest hydroelectric project was designed to tame the flood-prone Yangtze River and to generate clean energy. But the water is becoming polluted, and regular landslides are making life near the dam dangerous. Three Gorges dam is “a classic case in which government officials exaggerated the benefits and underestimated the risks,” says Patricia Adams of Probe International.