China
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Getting green and happy by exporting pollution and misery: not cool
Do you know where your Apple gadgets come from?Two things I’ve seen recently have got me thinking about how the Western world solves its problems by exporting them. First, over the weekend I saw The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a one-man theater performance from Seattle’s own Mike Daisey. It’s an absolutely brilliant […]
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Forget rice, think meat and yogurt: ‘Chinese food’ looking more and more like Western diet
Meating demand: Workers at an industrial meatpacking house in China try to keep up with their nation’s soaring appetite for animal products.Photo: Shreyans BhansaliIt’s Monday, which for many is now a meatless day, so it’s appropriate I think to highlight Howard Schneider’s Washington Post article on the long-anticipated Chinese meat-eating explosion: For China, the world’s […]
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Three Gorges Dam has serious issues, China admits
When a country commits to any project as monstrous as China's Three Gorges Dam, it is bound to encounter occasional difficulties. The Chinese government, as governments are wont to do, has preferred to gloss over the dam's detriments and emphasize its attributes, like the 84 billion kilowatt hours of electricity it produced last year. But […]
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Critical List: Reid, enviro groups talk air quality; DDT in Africa
Harry Reid met with Big Environment last night to strategize a defense of the Clean Air Act. Politico says a key point of debate was whether enviros should go after errant, but potentially vulnerable Dems on green issues during the next election cycle. Senators rejected a bill that would have sped up oil drilling, then […]
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Another danger of non-organic farming: Exploding watermelons
People opt for organically-farmed food for all different reasons, but here's one of the more compelling ones we've seen: Agricultural chemicals can make watermelons explode. Chinese watermelon crops just had an unfortunate run-in with the growth accelerator forchlorfenuron, which makes plants' cells divide faster to pump up growth rates. Supposedly forchlorfenuron can bump up harvest […]
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U.S. infrastructure needs a $2 trillion make-over
Like those bridges and roads and trains tracks you've got there? Want to keep them? That'll be $2 trillion. That's how much the Urban Land Institute estimates the U.S. needs to invest in infrastructure just to keep what's already in place from falling apart. Everybody else in the world gets this. In Europe, countries realize […]
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Jon Huntsman, once a climate hawk, now disses cap-and-trade like all the other Republicans [UPDATED]
He’s left China behind — and climate hawkishness too.Photo: saucy panA couple of months ago, I asked, “Is Jon Huntsman the greenest GOP presidential hopeful?” In 2007, as Utah governor, he brought his state into the Western Climate Initiative, a regional cap-and-trade program. And up through 2009, when he took the post of ambassador to […]
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Bill Gates on energy philanthropy, R&D funding, & why the U.S. will out-innovate China
Bill Gates goes casual at the Climate Solutions breakfast.Photo: nonfictionmediaThe Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — the richest in the world, with an endowment of $37 billion — doesn’t have plans to focus on clean energy and climate change, Bill Gates said on Tuesday. Speaking at a fundraiser for Northwest nonprofit Climate Solutions, he argued […]
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Critical List: U.N. is optimistic about renewables, U.S. studies ‘safe hydrofracking’
The U.N.'s climate change panel reports that, by 2050, 80 percent of the world's energy could come from renewables. The panel also issued this reassuring news: As long as we fulfill the most ambitious of renewable build-out plans and cut one-third of greenhouse gas, it is possible to keep the planet from nosediving into life-altering, […]
