Heavy snowstorms felled three power transmission towers along a majorline of the Three Gorges dam, disrupting a link in central China’s transmission system, Xinhua news agency reported last month.
Storm-damaged power grids and chronic shortages of coal, which fuels three quarters of China’s electricity supply, have contributed to power shortages that have forced more than a dozen provinces to ration electricity.
(March 11, 2008) In an interview with the London-based Financial Times, An Qingyuan, a former communist party chief, said the diversion of water to Beijing for the Olympics and for big hydropower projects threatens the lives of millions of peasant farmers in China’s north-western provinces.
A London-based insurance broker, Willis Group Holdings, has been awarded a two-year contract as the insurance consultant for the Three Gorges project, according to Joy Shaw, correspondent for MarketWatch in Shanghai.
Former communist party chief An Qingyuan is quoted saying the Sanmenxia dam on the Yellow River was a “stupid mistake” that has brought “severe disasters to the people living near the river.” He and others warn that Sanmenxia sets a disastrous precedent for the much larger Three Gorges project.
(April 20, 2008) Emergency workers are still trying to rescue almost 200 people from a village that was nearly inundated by a massive landslide near the Three Gorges dam in central China on Saturday, the official Xinhua news agency reports.
The Toronto Star highlights Chongqing, the world’s fastest growing metropolis of 32 million at the upper end of the Three Gorges reservoir.
(April 15, 2008) In their paper’s abstract, Gulati and Ludington set out to expose the “murky reality” of the life of Alexander Nahum Sack, and how this reality conflicts with the “myth perpetuated in the odious debts literature.” The dominant theme, though insinuated rather than stated clearly, is that the odious debts movement has deliberately exaggerated Sack’s eminence in order to establish the doctrine as customary international law. The authors also make few distinctions among the various organizations in the debt forgiveness movement. I would recommend that the authors stick to the facts rather than assign motives, and be precise in their charges rather than employing broad brushes.
(April 8, 2008) Fan Xiao, a geologist at the Bureau of Geological Exploration and Exploitation of Mineral Resources in Sichuan province, is quoted saying recent landslides in the Three Gorges area are directly linked to filling the reservoir. Water first seeps into the loose soil at the base of the area’s rocky cliffs, destabilizing the land and making it prone to slides.
(April 7, 2008) In a country where corruption is a way of life, the election result is a breathe of fresh air.
(April 4, 2008) Superlatives abound whenever the talk turns to Jatropha. In a very short time the tropical shrub has mutated from being a poisonous wild plant into the world’s miracle plant for agrofuel production. But as has been demonstrated in India, this does not mean the end of the competition between gas tank and plate.
(April 2, 2008) China is planning to divert billions of gallons of water hundreds of miles from drought-stricken regions to feed Olympic development in the capital Beijing.
(April 1, 2008) The recently proposed climate investment funds to be administered by the World Bank are under heavy fire for proposing a governance structure that replicates the inequities of the Bank’s board, undermines the UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) and fails to clarify whether money to these funds would be additional to G8 commitments on overseas development aid. Meanwhile World Bank’s support for coal-fired power generation is on the increase.
(April 1, 2008) As the United States designs its strategy for regulating emissions of greenhouse gases, two central issues have emerged. One is how to limit the cost of compliance while still maintaining environmental integrity. The other is how to “engage” developing countries in serious efforts to limit emissions. Industry and economists are rightly concerned about cost control yet have found it difficult to mobilize adequate political support for control mechanisms such as a “safety valve;” they also rightly caution that currently popular ideas such as a Fed-like Carbon Board are not sufficiently fleshed out to reliably play a role akin to a safety valve.
(April 1, 2008) Over the past decades, African countries have been forced by external debt burdens to undertake painful economic adjustments while devoting scarce foreign exchange to debt-service payments. On the other hand, African countries have experienced massive outflows of private capital towards Western financial centers. Indeed, these private assets surpass the continent’s foreign liabilities, ironically making sub-Saharan Africa a “net creditor” to the rest of the world.
(April 1, 2008) HidroAysén project a threat to Chile’s “pride and soul” says NRDC attorney
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