“Help from the people: Environmental activists are having an impact.
Power play: China’s underdog environmental agency scores a big victory
China enforcing green laws, suddenly ”
There are at least 3 good news from the link.

February 10, 2005 @ 11:29 pm | Comment

Sadly this is the price that we pay for progress. China is not doing anything that every other sizable developped or developing country is or will be doing, its simply doing things on a grander scale than every body else.

What would you preffer, nuclear power stations or coal burning power stations? Or maybe you’d prefer to be one of those people who doesn’t have electricity.

Whatever happens the environment will loose out to man, it always has done. People are merely quarrelling over how it will happen.

February 11, 2005 @ 6:00 am | Comment

The problem is, we don’t have the wiggle-room we used to, and we can’t afford the same thinking just because it’s always been that way. We are on the verge of a global environmental crisis, if we aren’t over the edge already. I’ve read recently that we’ve got 10-20 years to get a handle on CO2 emissions before that crisis completely gets beyond our technological ability to fix it – at least not without the kinds of huge, wrenching changes and incredible expenses that seem practically impossible to make.

I know that environmental impact in terms of CO2 emissions has been used to argue in favor of these huge hydroelectric projects, but isn’t it true that these Chinese dams are projected to have very limited useful lifespans before silting pretty much zaps their generating ability?

February 11, 2005 @ 2:57 pm | Comment

Lisa, absolutely right.

Jing, scroll through the “TGP News” link. The bad news, I’m afraid, is far more prevalent than the good.

February 11, 2005 @ 3:10 pm | Comment

Nuclear power it is then.

If people were really serious about green house gasses and other noxious fumes then they would kick America’s arse and tell it to stop riding around in huge V8 RVs and start buying small family cars like Europe is. They’d also start looking at how much exhust fumes are produce by high altitude jets.

Now there’s an environmental nightmare that has no benefits for anybody other than the motor industry.

February 12, 2005 @ 2:29 am | Comment

Since it seems that fossil fuel burning, coal, petroleum, are a big cause of the danger to the enviroment and to the health of the public, why in the world don’t the countries in the EU, US, China and others join together to promote the research and development of other, and I don’t mean nuclear, clean power sources.

What is being talked about is a worldwide disaster that will have enormous repercussions. Why are the governments talking about taxing fossil fuels to fund R&D of safe alternatives?

February 13, 2005 @ 10:53 am | Comment

Because too many of said governments are propped up by oil money – our current regime here in the US is a case in point.

If Al Gore had taken office, I believe things would be very different today.

February 13, 2005 @ 5:05 pm | Comment

Currently Great Britain is agressively moving to use wind power, but has found that it is very difficult to generate much power from alternative sources because of the space and resources issue that surround them.

For many countires, wind, solar and tide power are simply not effective to use on a large scale. They are expensive, require substantial investment, and they require a far larger footprint in terms of land than a conventional powerplant.

Look at the Europe, many countries are landlocked and don’t have the terain for inland hydroelectric power plants, they don’t have sufficent daylight during the winter to make solar power viable all year round, and only a few countries are able to use geothermal energy.

The US on the other hand has the daylight for solar power, the rivers for hydroelectric power, the coast for tidal power, and the plains for wind power but it is unwiulling to spend money on the infrastructure and the oil companies don’t want the competition.

Cleaner power plants also produce far less energy that nuclear and foscil burning power plants, and so we would need a lot more of them, and who wants a wind turbin in their back yard.

Japan and America are currently developing spherical tocomat fusion reactors (not that I know how to spell tocomat properly) that uses hydrogen fuel pelets, but a workable power plant is still quite a long way off.

Maybe we should be looking at energy conservation, we should make better use of what we have until such a time as we can build cleaner power plants. If our energy use continues to grow, it won’t matter if we build more green power plants because by the time that they’ve pumping out their juice, our energy needs will already have exceeded their capacity to meet it.

If we insulate our homes more effectively then we won’t need to use as much fuel to heat them in the winter or as much electricity to cool them in the summer, and if more people switched from gas drinking SUVs to small Japanese and European cars, the world would use less gas and we would produce less dangerous fumes in the form of exhaust gasses.

My house in China had such a high ceiling that it took forever to heat it up in the winter or to cool it down in the summer, and such bad insulation (OK, so it had not insulation whatsoever) that within minutes of me turning the space heater or the air conditioner off, it started to get cold/hot again. The waste of energy in houses like this is simply collosal, and is something that we need to fight against.

February 13, 2005 @ 7:45 pm | Comment