953. In China, the True Cost of Britain's Clean, Green Wind Power Experiment: Pollution on a Disastrous Scale

By Simon Parry and Ed Douglass, The Daily Mail, January 26, 2011

This toxic lake poisons Chinese farmers, their children and their land. It is what's left behind after making the magnets for Britain's latest wind turbines... and, as a special Live investigation reveals, is merely one of a multitude of environmental sins committed in the name of our new green Jerusalem.

The lake of toxic waste at Baotou, China, which as been dumped by the rare earth processing plants in the background.

On the outskirts of one of China’s most polluted cities, an old farmer stares despairingly out across an immense lake of bubbling toxic waste covered in black dust. He remembers it as fields of wheat and corn.

Yan Man Jia Hong is a dedicated Communist. At 74, he still believes in his revolutionary heroes, but he despises the young local officials and entrepreneurs who have let this happen.

‘Chairman Mao was a hero and saved us,’ he says. ‘But these people only care about money. They have destroyed our lives.’

Vast fortunes are being amassed here in Inner Mongolia; the region has more than 90 per cent of the world’s legal reserves of rare earth metals, and specifically neodymium, the element needed to make the magnets in the most striking of green energy producers, wind turbines.

Live has uncovered the distinctly dirty truth about the process used to extract neodymium: it has an appalling environmental impact that raises serious questions over the credibility of so-called green technology.

The reality is that, as Britain flaunts its environmental credentials by speckling its coastlines and unspoiled moors and mountains with thousands of wind turbines, it is contributing to a vast man-made lake of poison in northern China. This is the deadly and sinister side of the massively profitable rare-earths industry that the ‘green’ companies profiting from the demand for wind turbines would prefer you knew nothing about.

Hidden out of sight behind smoke-shrouded factory complexes in the city of Baotou, and patrolled by platoons of security guards, lies a five-mile wide ‘tailing’ lake. It has killed farmland for miles around, made thousands of people ill and put one of China’s key waterways in jeopardy.

This vast, hissing cauldron of chemicals is the dumping ground for seven million tons a year of mined rare earth after it has been doused in acid and chemicals and processed through red-hot furnaces to extract its components.

 

Wind power's uncertainties don't end with intermittency. There is huge controversy about how much energy a wind farm will produce (Pictured above, wind turbines in Dun Law, Scotland).

Rusting pipelines meander for miles from factories processing rare earths in Baotou out to the man-made lake where, mixed with water, the foul-smelling radioactive waste from this industrial process is pumped day after day. No signposts and no paved roads lead here, and as we approach security guards shoo us away and tail us. When we finally break through the cordon and climb sand dunes to reach its brim, an apocalyptic sight greets us: a giant, secret toxic dump, made bigger by every wind turbine we build.

The lake instantly assaults your senses. Stand on the black crust for just seconds and your eyes water and a powerful, acrid stench fills your lungs.

For hours after our visit, my stomach lurched and my head throbbed. We were there for only one hour, but those who live in Mr Yan’s village of Dalahai, and other villages around, breathe in the same poison every day.

Retired farmer Su Bairen, 69, who led us to the lake, says it was initially a novelty – a multi-coloured pond set in farmland as early rare earth factories run by the state-owned Baogang group of companies began work in the Sixties.

‘At first it was just a hole in the ground,’ he says. ‘When it dried in the winter and summer, it turned into a black crust and children would play on it. Then one or two of them fell through and drowned in the sludge below. Since then, children have stayed away.’

As more factories sprang up, the banks grew higher, the lake grew larger and the stench and fumes grew more overwhelming.

‘It turned into a mountain that towered over us,’ says Mr Su. ‘Anything we planted just withered, then our animals started to sicken and die.’

People too began to suffer. Dalahai villagers say their teeth began to fall out, their hair turned white at unusually young ages, and they suffered from severe skin and respiratory diseases. Children were born with soft bones and cancer rates rocketed.

Official studies carried out five years ago in Dalahai village confirmed there were unusually high rates of cancer along with high rates of osteoporosis and skin and respiratory diseases. The lake’s radiation levels are ten times higher than in the surrounding countryside, the studies found.

Since then, maybe because of pressure from the companies operating around the lake, which pump out waste 24 hours a day, the results of ongoing radiation and toxicity tests carried out on the lake have been kept secret and officials have refused to publicly acknowledge health risks to nearby villages.

There are 17 ‘rare earth metals’ – the name doesn’t mean they are necessarily in short supply; it refers to the fact that the metals occur in scattered deposits of minerals, rather than concentrated ores. Rare earth metals usually occur together, and, once mined, have to be separated.

 

Villagers Su Bairen, 69, and Yan Man Jia Hong, 74, stand on the edge of the six-mile-wide toxic lake in Baotou, China that has devastated their farmland and ruined the health of the people in their community.

Neodymium is commonly used as part of a Neodymium-Iron-Boron alloy (Nd2Fe14B) which, thanks to its tetragonal crystal structure, is used to make the most powerful magnets in the world. Electric motors and generators rely on the basic principles of electromagnetism, and the stronger the magnets they use, the more efficient they can be. It’s been used in small quantities in common technologies for quite a long time – hi-fi speakers, hard drives and lasers, for example. But only with the rise of alternative energy solutions has neodymium really come to prominence, for use in hybrid cars and wind turbines. A direct-drive permanent-magnet generator for a top capacity wind turbine would use 4,400lb of neodymium-based permanent magnet material.

In the pollution-blighted city of Baotou, most people wear face masks everywhere they go.

‘You have to wear one otherwise the dust gets into your lungs and poisons you,’ our taxi driver tells us, pulling over so we can buy white cloth masks from a roadside hawker.

Posing as buyers, we visit Baotou Xijun Rare Earth Co Ltd. A large billboard in front of the factory shows an idyllic image of fields of sheep grazing in green fields with wind turbines in the background.

In a smartly appointed boardroom, Vice General Manager Cheng Qing tells us proudly that his company is the fourth biggest producer of rare earth metals in China, processing 30,000 tons a year. He leads us down to a complex of primitive workshops where workers with no protective clothing except for cotton gloves and face masks ladle molten rare earth from furnaces with temperatures of 1,000°C.

The result is 1.5kg bricks of neodymium, packed into blue barrels weighing 250kg each. Its price has more than doubled in the past year – it now costs around £80 per kilogram. So a 1.5kg block would be worth £120 – or more than a fortnight’s wages for the workers handling them. The waste from this highly toxic process ends up being pumped into the lake looming over Dalahai.

The state-owned Baogang Group, which operates most of the factories in Baotou, claims it invests tens of millions of pounds a year in environmental protection and processes the waste before it is discharged.

According to Du Youlu of Baogang’s safety and environmental protection department, seven million tons of waste a year was discharged into the lake, which is already 100ft high and growing by three feet each year.

In what appeared an attempt to shift responsibility onto China’s national leaders and their close control of the rare earths industry, he added: ‘The tailing is a national resource and China will ultimately decide what will be done with the lake.’

Jamie Choi, an expert on toxics for Greenpeace China, says villagers living near the lake face horrendous health risks from the carcinogenic and radioactive waste.

‘There’s not one step of the rare earth mining process that is not disastrous for the environment. Ores are being extracted by pumping acid into the ground, and then they are processed using more acid and chemicals.

 

Inside the Baotou Xijun Rare Earth refinery in Baotou, where neodymium, essential in new wind turbine magnets, is processed.

Finally they are dumped into tailing lakes that are often very poorly constructed and maintained. And throughout this process, large amounts of highly toxic acids, heavy metals and other chemicals are emitted into the air that people breathe, and leak into surface and ground water. Villagers rely on this for irrigation of their crops and for drinking water. Whenever we purchase products that contain rare earth metals, we are unknowingly taking part in massive environmental degradation and the destruction of communities.’

The fact that the wind-turbine industry relies on neodymium, which even in legal factories has a catastrophic environmental impact, is an irony Ms Choi acknowledges.

‘It is a real dilemma for environmentalists who want to see the growth of the industry,’ she says. ‘But we have the responsibility to recognise the environmental destruction that is being caused while making these wind turbines.’

It’s a long way from the grim conditions in Baotou to the raw beauty of the Monadhliath mountains in Scotland. But the environmental damage wind turbines cause will be felt here, too. These hills are the latest battleground in a war being fought all over Britain – and particularly in Scotland – between wind-farm developers and those opposed to them.

Cameron McNeish, a hill walker and TV presenter who lives in the Monadhliath, campaigned for almost a decade against the Dunmaglass wind farm before the Scottish government gave the go-ahead in December. Soon, 33 turbines will be erected on the hills north of the upper Findhorn valley.

McNeish is passionate about this landscape: ‘It’s vast and wild and isolated,’ he says. Huge empty spaces, however, are also perfect for wind turbines and unlike the nearby Cairngorms there are no landscape designations to protect this area. When the Labour government put in place the policy framework and subsidies to boost renewable energy, the Monadhliath became a mouth-watering opportunity.

People have been trying to make real money from Scottish estates like Jack Hayward’s Dunmaglass. Hayward, a Bermuda-based property developer and former chairman of Wolverhampton Wanderers, struck a deal with renewable energy company RES which, campaigners believe, will earn the estate an estimated £9 million over the next 25 years.

Each of the turbines at Dunmaglass will require servicing, which means a network of new and improved roads 20 miles long being built across the hills. They also need 1,500 tons of concrete foundations to keep them upright in a strong wind, which will scar the area.

Dunmaglass is just one among scores of wind farms in Scotland with planning permission. Scores more are still in the planning system. There are currently 3,153 turbines in the UK overall, with a maximum capacity of 5,203 megawatts.

 

Around half of them are in Scotland. First Minister Alex Salmond and the Scottish government have said they want to get 80 per cent of Scotland’s electricity from renewables by 2020, which means more turbines spread across the country’s hills and moors.

Many environmental pressure groups share Salmond’s view. Friends of the Earth opposes the Arctic being ruined by oil extraction, but when it comes to damaging Scotland’s wilderness with concrete and hundreds of miles of roads, they say wind energy is worth it as the impact of climate change has to be faced.

‘No way of generating energy is 100 per cent clean and problem-free,’ says Craig Bennett, director of policy and campaigns at Friends of the Earth.

‘Wind energy causes far fewer problems than coal, gas or nuclear. If we don’t invest in green energy, business experts have warned that future generations will be landed with a bill that will dwarf the current financial crisis. But we need to ensure the use of materials like neodymium and concrete is kept to a minimum, that turbines use recycled materials wherever possible and that they are carefully sited to the reduce the already minimal impact on bird populations.’

But Helen McDade, head of policy at the John Muir Trust, a small but feisty campaign group dedicated to protecting Scotland’s wild lands, also points out that leaving aside the damage to the landscape, nobody is really sure how much carbon is being released by the renewable energy construction boom. Peat moors lock up huge amounts of carbon, which gets released when it’s drained to put up a turbine.

Environmental considerations aside, as the percentage of electricity generated by wind increases, renewable energy is coming under a lot more scrutiny now for one simple reason – money. We pay extra for wind power – around twice as much – because it can’t compete with other forms of electricity generation. Under the Renewable Obligation (RO), suppliers have to buy a percentage of their electricity from renewable generators and can hand that cost on to consumers. If they don’t, they pay a fine instead.

One unit cell of Nd2Fe14b, the alloy used in neodymium magnets. The structure of the atoms gives the alloy its magnetic strength, due to a phenomenon known as magnetocrystalline anisotropy.

There’s a simple beauty about RO for the government. Even though it’s defined as a tax, it doesn’t come out of pay packets but is stuck on our electricity bills. That has made funding wind farms a lot easier for the government than more cost-effective energy-efficiency measures.

‘If you want a grant for an energy conservation project on your house,’ says Helen McDade, ‘the money comes from taxes. But investment for turbines comes from energy companies.’

Already, RO adds £1.4 billion to our bills each year to provide a pot of money to pay power companies for their ‘green’ electricity. By 2020, the figure will have risen to somewhere between £5 billion and £10 billion.

When he was Chancellor, Gordon Brown added another decade to these price guarantees, extending the RO scheme to 2037, guaranteeing the subsidy for more than a quarter of a century.

It’s not surprising there’s been an avalanche of wind-farm applications in the Highlands. Wind speeds are stronger, land is cheaper and the government loves you.

‘You go to a landowner,’ McDade says, ‘and offer him what is peanuts to an energy company yet keeps him happily on his estate so they can put up a wind farm, which in turn raises ordinary people’s electricity bills. There’s a social issue here that doesn’t get discussed.’

By 2020, environmental regulation will be adding 31 per cent to our bills. That’s £160 green tax out of an average annual bill of £512. As costs rise, more people will be driven into fuel poverty. When he was secretary of state at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, Ed Miliband decreed that these increases should be offset by improvements in energy efficiencies.

It’s a view shared by his successor Chris Huhne, who says inflation due to RO will be effectively one per cent. Britain’s low-income families, facing hikes in petrol and food costs, will hope he’s right.

Individual households aren’t the only ones shouldering the costs. Industry faces an even bigger burden. By 2020, environmental charges will add 33 per cent to industry’s energy costs.

Jeremy Nicholson, director of the Energy Intensive Users Group, says that, ‘Industry is getting the worst of both worlds. Around 80 per cent of the contracts for the new Thanet offshore wind farm (off the coast of Kent) went abroad, but the expensive electricity will be paid for here.’

Our current obsession with wind power, according to John Constable of energy think-tank the Renewable Energy Foundation, stems from the decision of the European Union on how to tackle climate change. Instead of just setting targets for reducing emissions, the EU told governments that by 2020, 15 per cent of all the energy we use must come from renewable sources.

Because of how we heat our houses and run our cars with gas and petrol, 30 per cent of electricity needs to come from renewables. And in the absence of other technologies, that means wind turbines. But there’s a structural flaw in the plan, which this winter has brutally exposed.

Study a graph of electricity consumption and it appears amazingly predictable, even down to reduced demand on public holidays. The graph for wind energy output, however, is far less predictable.

Take the figures for December, when we all shivered through sub-zero temperatures and wholesale electricity prices surged. Peak demand for the UK on 20 December was just over 60,000 megawatts. Maximum capacity for wind turbines throughout the UK is 5,891 megawatts, almost ten per cent of that peak demand figure.

Yet on December 20, because winds were light or non-existent, wind energy contributed a paltry 140 megawatts. Despite billions of pounds in investment and subsidies, Britain’s wind-turbine fleet was producing a feeble 2.43 per cent of its own capacity – and little more than 0.2 per cent of the nation’s electricity in the coldest month since records began.

The problems with the intermittency of wind energy are well known. A new network of cables linking ten countries around the North Sea is being suggested to smooth supply and take advantage of 140 gigawatts of offshore wind power. No one knows for sure how much this network will cost, although a figure of £25 billion has been mooted.

The government has also realised that when wind nears its target of 30 per cent, power companies will need more back-up to fill the gap when the wind doesn’t blow. Britain’s total capacity will need to rise from 76 gigawatts up to 120 gigawatts. That overcapacity will need another £50 billion and drive down prices when the wind’s blowing. Power companies are anxious about getting a decent price. Once again, consumers will pay.

Wind power’s uncertainties don’t end with intermittency. There is huge controversy about how much energy a wind farm will produce. Many developers claim their installations will achieve 30 per cent of their maximum output over the course of a year. More sober energy analysts suggest 26 per cent. But even that figure is starting to look generous. In December, the average figure was less than 21 per cent. In the year between October 2009 and September 2010, the average was 23.6 per cent, still nowhere near industry claims.

Then there’s the thorny question of how many homes new installations can power. 

According to wind farm developers like Scottish and Southern Electricity, a house uses 3.3MWh in a year. Lobby group RenewablesUK – formerly the British Wind Energy Association – gives a figure of 4.7MWh. In the Highlands electricity usage is even higher.

Last year, a report from the Royal Academy of Engineering warned that transforming our energy supply to produce a low-carbon economy would require the biggest investment and social change seen in peacetime. And yet Professor Sue Ion, who led the report, warned, ‘We are nowhere near having a plan.’

So, against the backdrop of environmental catastrophe in China and these less than attractive calculations, could the billions being thrown at wind farms be better spent? Undoubtedly, says John Constable.

‘The government is betting the farm on the throw of a die. What’s happening now is simply reckless.’

NUCLEAR, COAL, SOLAR, HYDRO, WIND: HOW THE ENERGY OPTIONS STACK UP

 

The British energy market is a hugely complicated and ever-changing landscape. We rely on a number of different sources for our energy - some more efficient than others, some more polluting than others.

Here, you can see how much energy each type contributes, how much they are predicted to contribute in 2020, how much carbon dioxide they generate and how efficient they are.

Renewable energy sources receive varying subsidies - which are added to our energy bills - as a result of the government's Renewables Obligation, whereas 'traditional' sources do not.

Critically, government cost figures do not include subsidies, whereas our measure shows precisely how much money a power station receives for each megawatt-hour (MWh) it produces, which includes the price paid for the energy by the supplier and any applicable subsidy. This is an instant measure of an energy supply's cost-efficiency; the lower the figure, the less that energy costs to produce.



Note: figures relate to UK energy production. Approximately seven per cent of our electricity comes from imports or other sources

952. The World's Small farmers Will Meet in Thailand to Promote Agroecology

La Via Campesina delegations from South and Southeast Asia

By La Via Campesina Media Advisory, La Via Campesina, November 5, 2012 

(Jakarta, November 5, 2012) - The global peasants movement, La Via Campesina (LVC) will hold a global encounter of agroecology trainers and peasant agroecology schools at the Community Agroecology Foundation in Surin, Thailand from the 6 -12 November. The meeting will be organized by the Assembly of the Poor of Thailand, an organization of urban and rural poor, small farmers, and workers and a member of LVC. Peasant agroecology trainers from all over the world and representatives of the various farmers’ agroecology schools of LVC peasant movements will come together in Surin to continue their efforts to promote agroecology on a global scale.

LVC is a strong proponent of sustainable peasants agriculture based on agroecology. Agroecology is a science, but is also seen as a movement, or practice which is concerned with farming methods that are based on peasant’s knowledge, local inputs as well as natures own principles rather than external inputs and technologies that damage nature such as the green revolution model. But LVC takes agroecology a step further than most, it is not just about ecological productive principles but also about social and political principles. A feudal land holding cannot be considered agroecological even if it is chemical free, a farm that is controlled only by men without any role and decision making power for women is not agroecological either, neither is a so called organic farm which replaces expensive chemical inputs for expensive organic ones without touching the structure of monoculture. There are countless names for such type of farming all over the world and LVC is not concerned with names or labels, whether agroecology, organic farming, natural farming, low external input sustainable agriculture, or others, but rather wants to specify the key ecological, social and political principles that the movement defends. For LVC, truly sustainable peasants agriculture comes from the recovery of traditional peasant farming methods, and the innovation of new ecological practices.

The meeting in Thailand is a culmination of a series of continental level agroecology meetings that LVC has already organized in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas over the last four years. This has served the movement to consolidate and make a database of the various types of knowledge and expertise of local agroecological farming methods that are already practiced among peasant movements and to link up these experiences so that farmers organizations can share such knowledge with each other, not just nationally but especially regionally and globally.

Such farmer to farmers exchanges are very effective argues LVC, and farmers protagonism must be placed at the center of such efforts. Cuba for e.g. is a country that has transformed its chemical based production systems into agroecological integrated and diversified farming systems and spread it to more than one-third of all peasant families in Cuba, a remarkable rate of growth in less than ten years, possible only because of the farmer to farmer process and strong support to the small farmer movement. There are countless such examples of successful farmer to farmer exchanges all over the world. LVC stresses the importance of organizing them well and engaging peasants organizations in order to scale them up. Many such examples will be shared at the Thailand agroecology encounter.

Besides various meetings, the participants will also visit local agroecological farmers in the Surin province of Thailand where the local hosts, AOP have taken a lead role in turning farmers fields from chemical to agroecological and have initiated programs on the ecological production of rice, herbs and also agroforestry. Such initiatives are a breakthrough in Thai agriculture which has mainly become dependent on the green revolution model. On the 12th November, there will be a public forum at the Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok city, that aims to build alliances with different organizations and to promote LVC’s concepts of food sovereignty and sustainable peasants agriculture among the Thai public.

Another important process that will take place in Thailand is a global exchange between peasant’s agroecology schools. Peasant’s movements all over the world have different training processes, some are very informal, where there may not even be a building to call a school, and some are at advanced levels where even formal degrees are provided. LVCs schools are present in about 40 countries such as Venezuela, Brazil, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Argentina and others at initial stages in India and Indonesia among others. This will be the first time that a formal exchange will be conducted in order to strengthen links between these schools in order to exchange experiences. Such people to people exchanges of local alternatives are crucial to resist the mainstream development model which has caused serious social and environmental crisis as well as hunger.

Contact for media

Mr. Baramee Chaiyarat (Assembly of the Poor) | +66- 81-685-9458 | languages: Thai, English

Tejo Pramono | tpramono@viacampesina.org | languages: English

Ashlesha Khadse | +66-82-221-3962 | secretariatlvcsouthasia@gmail.com | languages: English, Spanish

for more info visit www.viacampesina.org

951. Chinese Protestor: "Environment Is More Important Than Investments Or Jobs"

Chinese youth protest air pollution

By Keith Bradsher, The New York Times, November 6, 2012

SHIFANG, China — Local leaders were all smiles this summer at a groundbreaking ceremony for a vast copper smelting project that seemed like the answer to the chronic unemployment that has plagued this city in northern Sichuan ever since a devastating earthquake in 2008.

But within days, the tree-lined plaza at the heart of the city was packed with thousands of youths, protesting that the $1.6 billion factory would pose a pollution hazard. After two nights of street battles pitting youths against the riot police, city leaders canceled the smelter.

“The environment is more important” than new investments or jobs, said a young woman sitting, on a recent afternoon, at the cafe across the street from the plaza, now empty except for a clutch of retirees gathered under the clock tower.

China’s economic boom over the last three decades has depended overwhelmingly on a build-at-all-costs investment strategy in which pollution concerns, the preservation of neighborhoods and other such questions have been swept aside. But that approach is starting to backfire, posing one of the biggest challenges for the new generation of Chinese policy makers who will take over at the Communist Party Congress, which starts on Thursday.

New investment projects used to be seen as the best way to keep the Chinese public happy with jobs and rising incomes, assuring social stability — a paramount goal of the Communist Party — while frequently enriching local politicians as well.

But from Shifang in the west to the port of Ningbo in the east, where a week of sometimes violent protests forced the suspension on Oct. 28 of plans to expand a chemical plant, more projects are running into public hostility. In many cases, they are running into opposition not just from farmers who do not want their houses and fields confiscated, but also from a growing middle class fearful that new factories will lead to more environmental damage.

In response to this and other worries about the economy, a number of influential officials and business leaders in China have stepped up their calls for changes aimed at increasing the efficiency of investment and simultaneously shifting the country toward a greater reliance on consumption.

But China’s leaders, including the outgoing prime minister, Wen Jiabao, have been talking about such a transformation for years with little sign of success, as state-controlled banks continue to lend huge sums to politically powerful state-owned enterprises and local governments.

Frenzied construction of roads, bridges, tunnels and rail lines over the last decade has left China with world-class infrastructure. But it has also produced deeply indebted local governments that are struggling to finance more projects.

At the same time, vast unused capacity in practically every industrial sector has crippled profitability and left manufacturing firms straining to repay their borrowings, a problem that has been partly masked by banks in the habit of simply rolling over loans rather than recognizing losses.

“All Chinese industries are like that — can you dig out which area of Chinese industry is not in overcapacity?” said Li Junfeng, a longtime director general for energy at China’s top economic planning agency.

Investment reached 46 percent of China’s economic output last year. By comparison, Japan’s investment rate peaked at 36 percent, which it reached in the early 1970s; South Korea topped out at 39 percent in the late 1980s.

Growth in Japan and South Korea started to slow and eventually tumbled after investment peaked. The big question now is when China will run into the same limits, and how rapidly change will take place, said Diana Choyleva, an economist at Lombard Street Research in Hong Kong. “The potential for a big crisis is always there,” she said.

Even experts who strongly favor fundamental policy changes, like moving to a more market-oriented system for allocating bank loans and setting interest rates, doubt that China’s leaders are preparing to move quickly. Conversations at senior levels of the Communist Party appear to have focused so far on reducing the state’s role in the day-to-day management of many state-owned enterprises rather than selling them or breaking them up.

But a few hints have surfaced that sentiment for reining in the excessive reliance on business investment might be strengthening even among those segments of the Chinese elite — executives at China’s big state-owned enterprises — that benefit the most from the status quo.

Zhu Fushou, the chief executive of the Dongfeng Motor Corporation, one of China’s largest car and truck manufacturers, startled executives at an industry conference in September when he said that China might have almost all the cars it needs, at least for the near-term, and that the government should discourage further investment in the sector.

Mr. Zhu called for greater reliance on the free market to determine the winners and losers in major industries, chastising other auto executives for complaining too much about competition.

Such griping “is not objective — it’s irrational, incompetent and immature,” Mr. Zhu said at the Global Automotive Forum in Chengdu, the main annual conference for executives from Chinese automakers and the China units of global car companies like General Motors and Volkswagen.

Mr. Zhu’s remarks were especially striking because of Dongfeng’s longstanding close ties to Beijing as a pillar of Chinese heavy industry ever since Mao ordered its founding in 1969. Mr. Zhu’s predecessor at Dongfeng, Miao Wei, is now the minister of industry and information technology, leading an office that has long favored government-organized oligopolies of state-owned enterprises in many industries.

The auto industry in China is operating at about 60 percent of capacity this year, typical of Chinese industries these days, according to a report this summer from the International Monetary Fund.

By contrast, United States auto factories and those in other industries usually operate at a much higher rate; even during the worst days of the economic crisis in 2009, capacity utilization in American industry fell no lower than 66.8 percent and then only briefly, according to Federal Reserve data.

For many years, economists inside and outside of China have recommended a shift toward more reliance on consumption to sustain growth over the longer run. Progress has been slow, in part because the government has set a cautious pace in offering more medical insurance and pensions, forcing many Chinese to maintain high savings rates to provide their own safety net.

But the rising tide of protests against big investment projects may put pressure on Beijing to move faster. Almost every region of China has been affected within the last year or so, starting with a protest against a large chemical plant in northeastern China in August 2011; the local government promised a crowd it would close that plant but after the crowds went home, the plant has continued to operate.

Just in the last two weeks, there have been numerous demonstrations against a proposed coal-fired power plant on the southeast coast of the island of Hainan and against the expansion of the petrochemical plant in Ningbo, a port near Shanghai.

Shifang, the site of the canceled copper smelter, is a town full of retirees that had hoped to create more jobs for its young people, instead of sending them off to factories in Chengdu, a 90-minute bus ride to the south, or even to Guangdong in southern China, a 30-hour train ride. Yet many youths joined the protests here in July, with some even traveling from nearby towns, and the recent Ningbo protests also attracted many youths.

The re-emergence of youth protests is surprising because in a nation of one-child families, Chinese parents often seek to stop their offspring from participating in political activity because they worry that it will harm their future careers. The Chinese authorities have shown scant tolerance for anyone who travels to another town to participate in a protest.

It is not clear whether Beijing officials will heed further protests around the country or decide instead that they see no other way to stimulate economic growth than to keep fostering ever more heavy industry projects. They appear to be keeping all options open.

On the outskirts of Shifang, there was no sign of work at the smelter site, but a uniformed soldier stood near a heavy steel barrier painted in bright red and white. Large signs warned visitors not to enter.

And about 100 yards past the barrier sat a dozen troop carrier trucks, to make sure no one did.

950. Spread of Dengue in India Poses Public Health Threat for the World

By Gardiner Harris, The New York Times, November 6, 2012

Yamuna River, by New Delhi is an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes

NEW DELHI — An epidemic of dengue fever in India is fostering a growing sense of alarm even as government officials here have publicly refused to acknowledge the scope of a problem that experts say is threatening hundreds of millions of people, not just in India but around the world.

India has become the focal point for a mosquito-borne plague that is sweeping the globe. Reported in just a handful of countries in the 1950s, dengue (pronounced DEN-gay) is now endemic in half the world’s nations.

“The global dengue problem is far worse than most people know, and it keeps getting worse,” said Dr. Raman Velayudhan, the World Health Organization’s lead dengue coordinator.

The tropical disease, though life-threatening for a tiny fraction of those infected, can be extremely painful. Growing numbers of Western tourists are returning from warm-weather vacations with the disease, which has reached the shores of the United States and Europe. Last month, health officials in Miami announced a case of locally acquired dengue infection.

Here in India’s capital, where areas of standing water contribute to the epidemic’s growth, hospitals are overrun and feverish patients are sharing beds and languishing in hallways. At Kalawati Saran Hospital, a pediatric facility, a large crowd of relatives lay on mats and blankets under the shade of a huge banyan tree outside the hospital entrance recently.

Among them was Neelam, who said her two grandchildren were deathly ill inside. Eight-year-old Sneha got the disease first, followed by Tanya, 7, she said. The girls’ parents treated them at home but then Sneha’s temperature rose to 104 degrees, a rash spread across her legs and shoulders, and her pain grew unbearable.

“Sneha has been given five liters of blood,” said Neelam, who has one name. “It is terrible.”

Officials say that 30,002 people in India had been sickened with dengue fever through October, a 59 percent jump from the 18,860 recorded for all of 2011. But the real number of Indians who get dengue fever annually is in the millions, several experts said.

“I’d conservatively estimate that there are 37 million dengue infections occurring every year in India, and maybe 227,500 hospitalizations,” said Dr. Scott Halstead, a tropical disease expert focused on dengue research.

A senior Indian government health official, who agreed to speak about the matter only on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that official figures represent a mere sliver of dengue’s actual toll. The government only counts cases of dengue that come from public hospitals and that have been confirmed by laboratories, the official said. Such a census, “which was deliberated at the highest levels,” is a small subset that is nonetheless informative and comparable from one year to the next, he said.

“There is no denying that the actual number of cases would be much, much higher,” the official said. “Our interest has not been to arrive at an exact figure.”

The problem with that policy, said Dr. Manish Kakkar, a specialist at the Public Health Foundation of India, is that India’s “massive underreporting of cases” has contributed to the disease’s spread. Experts from around the world said that India’s failure to construct an adequate dengue surveillance system has impeded awareness of the illness’s vast reach, discouraged efforts to clean up the sources of the disease and slowed the search for a vaccine.

“When you look at the number of reported cases India has, it’s a joke,” said Dr. Harold S. Margolis, chief of the dengue branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Neighboring Sri Lanka, for instance, reported nearly three times as many dengue cases as India through August, according to the World Health Organization, even though India’s population is 60 times larger.

Part of India’s problem is that some officials view reports of dengue infections as politically damaging. In September, Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal, dismissed reports of an increasing number of dengue-related deaths, saying doctors were misdiagnosing. “So everyone is earning a bad name,” she said at a news conference.

A central piece of evidence for those who contend that India suffers hundreds of times more dengue cases than the government acknowledges is a recent and as yet unpublished study of dengue infections in West Bengal that found about the same presence of dengue as in Thailand, where almost every child is infected by dengue at least once before adulthood.

“I would say that anybody over the age of 20 in India has been infected with dengue,” said Dr. Timothy Endy, chief of infectious disease at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse.

For those who arrive in India as adults, “you have a reasonable expectation of getting dengue after a few months,” said Dr. Joseph M. Vinetz, a professor at the University of California at San Diego. “If you stay for a longer period, it’s a certainty.”

The reason that such an extensive epidemic can hide in plain sight is that as many as 80 percent of dengue infections cause only mild symptoms of fatigue, said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. For many, the disease is experienced as “maybe just a fever that someone shrugs off.”

But the remaining 20 percent may be affected by more serious flulike symptoms, with high fever, vomiting, searing pain behind the eyes, skin rash, and muscle and joint aches that can be so intense that the illness has been dubbed “breakbone fever.”

The acute part of the illness generally passes within two weeks, but symptoms of fatigue and depression can linger for months. In about 1 percent of cases, dengue advances to a life-threatening cascade of immune responses known as hemorrhagic or shock dengue.

This potentially mortal condition generally happens only after a second dengue infection. There are four strains of the dengue virus, and infection with a second strain can fool the immune system, allowing the virus to replicate. When the body finally realizes its mistake, it floods the system with so many immune attackers that they are poisonous. Such patients must be provided intravenous fluids and round-the-clock care to avoid death.

Twenty years ago, just one of every 50 tourists who returned from the tropics with fever was infected by dengue; now, it is one in six, said Dr. Velayudhan, the W.H.O. official. The Portuguese archipelago of Madeira is in the midst of an epidemic.

On Oct. 9, Puerto Rico’s Health Department declared a dengue epidemic after at least six people died and nearly 5,000 people were sickened.

The great danger of having hundreds of millions of people in India with undiagnosed and unacknowledged primary infections is that a sudden shift in the circulating dengue strain could cause a widespread increase in life-threatening illnesses.

“We have been fortunate so far,” said Dr. Kakkar of the Indian public health group. “But if, God forbid, we come across that situation we probably need far better health-care management and inpatient care facilities.”

Trucks spewing pesticides against mosquitoes are now a regular presence in New Delhi neighborhoods, but rapid and disorderly urbanization — a hallmark of India’s development — increases the risks of dengue proliferation, so few believe the government here can do much to halt its spread.

The best hope for relief is a vaccine, but a recent trial of the most advanced vaccine candidate largely failed.

“I think we’re looking at 10 to 12 years before we see an effective vaccine, and that’s if we’re lucky,” Dr. Halstead said. “In the meantime, we’re in trouble.”

949. Lights Still Out in Cuba's 2nd City After Sandy

Relief aid from Venezuela arrives in Santiago de Cuba

By Anne-Marie Garcia, Associated Press, November 5, 201

HAVANA — Cuba’s second city is still struggling to recover from the effects of Hurricane Sandy even as streetlamps in hard-hit lower Manhattan shine brightly and its subways begin rumbling through tunnels again.

Two weeks after the storm blasted through Santiago, Cuba, the electrical grid has been restored to just 28 percent of normal as workers labor around the clock to replace power lines downed by thousands of fallen trees, the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina reported Monday.

‘‘Sources in (state-run power company) Empresa Electrica emphasized that the task is titanic since it means building practically all of the secondary networks from the ground up,’’ the agency said, and those are the ones ‘‘that deliver energy to homes and were the most impaired.’’

Much of the storm debris has been cleared from the streets, and students went back to classes there Monday in a sign of some return to normalcy for the city of about 500,000 people.

Residents said stores are offering early sales of basic foods that had been planned for distribution later in the year. People unable to cook in their darkened homes are relying on canned food, and the lucky few who have power are giving neighbors a hand by boiling their water or letting them charge cellphones.

‘‘Things have been getting better, but we still don’t have electricity. Near my house there are streets that do ... I'm anxiously awaiting it,’’ Berta Serguera, 82, told The Associated Press by phone from Santiago.

‘‘The situation is very tough,’’ said her sister Mirta Serguera, 79.

A naval helicopter carrier arrived from the capital carrying enough roofing material for 37,000 homes and more than 6,000 public buildings, the Santiago newspaper Sierra Maestra reported.

A Venezuelan naval vessel docked in Santiago on Monday carrying 227 tons of humanitarian aid for storm victims.

State-run website Cubadebate published photos of a cleaned up Parque de Cespedes, Santiago’s main square, stripped of trees but well groomed as workers soldered ornamental metal fences and hauled off shrubbery ripped out by the gale-force winds.

Sandy hit southeastern Cuba on Oct. 25 as a Category 2 hurricane, killing 11 people, damaging more than 200,000 homes and causing major losses to coffee and other crops. Authorities have not yet given an estimate of the total economic toll.

Some 895 schools in Santiago were also damaged, according to a report by Communist Party newspaper Granma.

Many were repaired and functioning again Monday, but 129 were badly damaged, leaving students to gather in private homes, libraries, cultural centers and movie theaters, or be sent to other schools.

Some classes were also held in homes in neighboring Holguin province, Granma said.

In Santiago, hospitals, fire and water stations, bakeries and tall buildings were receiving priority power service, and electrical grid repairs were expected to finish by Nov. 15 with the help of crews drafted from across the country.

President Raul Castro remained in the city on his tour of the hardest-hit zones and promised to personally ensure that recovery efforts proceed apace.

‘‘We all know the problems you have. Do not lose faith in the revolution,’’ Castro said in remarks broadcast on television over the weekend. ‘‘I will remain here until the electricity returns.’’

Yolanda Tabio, a 67-year-old resident of central Santiago, said that after 12 days in the dark, she’s hopeful the lights will come back on soon. Her gas was restored three days ago, though phone service is still intermittent.

‘‘The most important thing is to be able to boil water, because it comes out really cloudy and you have to take measures to avoid disease,’’ Tabio said.

John Ging, the operations chief for the U.N. humanitarian office, told a news conference Monday that the agency is mobilizing efforts to help both Cuba and Haiti.

Ging said in Haiti 27,000 homes have been destroyed, crops have been damaged, 50 people have died and ‘‘hundreds of thousands are now going to depend on our assistance.’’

‘‘Cuba is also badly affected,’’ he said. ‘‘2,000 schools there are damaged ... and we estimate now 500,000 people in need of assistance, food and other items, so again we are mobilizing response on both of those countries.’’

948. Brazil Embarks on Cloning of Wild Animals

This jaguar is one of the first three species that Brazilian scientists will attempt to clone. Credit:
Courtesy of the Brasilia Zoo
 

By Alice Marcondes, IPS, November 6, 2012 

RIO DE JANEIRO - Brazilian scientists are attempting to clone animals in danger of extinction, like the jaguar and maned wolf, although the potential impact on the conservation of these threatened species is still not clear.

The cloning initiative is being undertaken by the Brasilia Zoological Garden in partnership with the Brazilian government’s agricultural research agency, EMBRAPA, and is now in its second phase. The research is aimed at adapting cloning techniques to wild animal species as a means of contributing to conservation.

The first phase involved the collection of samples of genetic material, or germplasm, in the form of blood, sperm, somatic cells and umbilical cord cells.

“We already have 420 germplasm samples stored in our bank and are going to continue collecting,” EMBRAPA researcher Carlos Frederico Martins told Tierramérica*.

Eight animals have been chosen for the initiative, including the maned wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus), the jaguar (Panthera onca) and the black lion tamarin (Leontopithecus chrysopygus). Most are on the Red List of Threatened Species compiled by the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

The samples were gathered over the course of two years. In addition to the three species mentioned above, the bank has also been stocked with germplasm from the bush dog (Speothos venaticus), coati (genus Nasua), collared anteater (Tamandua tetradactyla), gray brocket deer (Mazama gouazoubira) and bison (genus Bison).

The researchers harvested the genetic material primarily from dead specimens of animals native to the Cerrado, the vast tropical savannah biome that stretches across central Brazil.

The next phase will be the training of researchers at the zoo.

“At EMBRAPA we have already cloned cows. What we are going to do now is to transfer our knowledge to the researchers so that they can conduct studies to adapt the technique to wild animals,” said Martins.

EMBRAPA was responsible for the birth of the first cloned animal in Brazil, a calf named Vitória, who was born in 2001 and lived until 2011.

After Vitória, many other animals have been cloned, mainly cows and horses who now add up to over 100 living specimens.

A bill that has been making its way through the Brazilian senate since 2007 would establish regulations for the practice of cloning, since the current legislation does not set very clear rules.

“Research can be freely conducted, but there is little monitoring and control. Any laboratory can clone cows, so it is impossible to precisely say how many clones exist,” explained the EMBRAPA researcher.

This is Brazil’s first attempt at cloning wild animals. Martins noted that “countries like the United States and South Korea are already working on similar research.”

The lack of prior experience makes it difficult to foresee how long it will take to produce the first clone, he said. But “we can predict that it will probably be a maned wolf, since this is the species for which we have many samples of genetic material,” he added.

Martins stressed, however, that the goal is not to release the clones into the wild. “The zoo wants to increase the number of specimens for its own use. The idea is to keep these animals in captivity. The use of clones would prevent the impact caused by the removal of these animals from their natural setting,” he said.

“From the point of view of conservation, the ideal approach is to preserve and multiply the number of wild animals where they are found,” he emphasised. Since cloned specimens contain the exact same genes as the animals they were cloned from, “they do not have the genetic variability that would make it beneficial to release them in the wild,” he explained.

Cloned animals would only be released in extreme cases, Martins said.

“If a certain species was in a state of drastic decline, at risk of total extinction, and it was possible to provide reinforcement, we will have the capacity,” Juciara Pelles, the head of conservation and research at the Brasilia Zoo, told Tierramérica.

“We are still in the phase of developing the technology, so we still don’t know if it will be possible to rescue a population in the wild, but we could potentially make it viable again,” she added.

The current technique has a five to seven percent rate of effectiveness. According to Martins, this percentage is within the average range achieved worldwide.

“It’s a low number, which makes the technology more costly, but it is average. The research underway is also aimed at raising it,” he noted.

For Onildo João Marini Filho, a biologist at ICMBio, the cloning of horses and cows is justified by its commercial purposes. But the cloning of wild animals needs to be handled with caution.

“There has to be a very tangible benefit for conservation. If there is something to be gained, it is valid. It might be possible, for example, to increase the number of animals to help with a breeding programme,” he told Tierramérica.

In order for the second phase of the research to effectively begin, the Brasilia Zoo is waiting for legal authorisation from the relevant agencies. It is hoped that the initial steps towards the creation of the first clone can be taken in approximately one month. “This is a long-term project,” said Pelles.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

947. Will Climate Change Get Some Respect Now?

Remains of some 100 homes burned down in
New York during the storm

By Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times, October 31, 2012

President Obama and Mitt Romney seemed determined not to discuss climate change in this campaign. So thanks to Hurricane Sandy for forcing the issue: Isn’t it time to talk not only about weather, but also about climate?

It’s true, of course, that no single storm or drought can be attributed to climate change. Atlantic hurricanes in the Northeast go way back, as the catastrophic “snow hurricane” of 1804 attests. But many scientists believe that rising carbon emissions could make extreme weather — like Sandy — more likely.

“You can’t say any one single event is reflective of climate change,” William Solecki, the co-chairman of the New York City Panel on Climate Change, told me. “But it’s illustrative of the conditions and events and scenarios that we expect with climate change.”

In that sense, whatever its causes, Sandy offers a window into the way ahead.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York says he told President Obama the other day that it seems “we have a 100-year flood every two years now.” Indeed, The Times has reported that three of the 10 biggest floods in Lower Manhattan since 1900 have occurred in the last three years.

So brace yourself, for several reasons:

• Hurricanes form when the ocean is warm, and that warmth is their fuel. The Atlantic waters off the East Coast set a record high temperature this summer. Presumably most of that is natural variation, and some is human-induced climate change.

• Computer models suggest that hurricanes won’t necessarily become more frequent, but they may become stronger. As the United States Global Change Research Program, a collaboration of federal agencies, puts it, “The intensity of these storms is likely to increase in this century.”

• Climate change adds moisture to the atmosphere, which may mean that storms come with more rain and more flooding.

• Sandy was particularly destructive because it was prevented from moving back out to sea by a “blocking pattern” associated with the jet stream. There’s debate about this, but one recent study suggested that melting sea ice in the Arctic may lead to such blocking.

• Rising seas create a higher baseline for future storm surges. The New York City Panel on Climate Change has projected that coastal waters may rise by two feet by 2050 and four feet by the end of the century.

I was schooled in the far-reaching changes under way several years ago by Eskimos in Alaska, who told me of their amazement at seeing changes in their Arctic village — from melting permafrost to robins (for which their Inupiat language has no word), and even a (shivering) porcupine. If we can’t see that something extraordinary is going on in the world around us, we’re in trouble.

“Of the 10 warmest summers on record for the contiguous United States, seven have occurred since 2000,” notes Jake Crouch of the National Climatic Data Center.

They include this summer’s drought in the United States, the worst in more than half a century.

“For the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change,” James E. Hansen, a NASA climate scientist, recently wrote in The Washington Post.

Politicians have dropped the ball, but so have those of us in the news business. The number of articles about climate change fell by 41 percent from 2009 to 2011, according to DailyClimate.org.

There are no easy solutions, but we may need to invest in cleaner energy, impose a carbon tax or other curbs on greenhouse gases, and, above all, rethink how we can reduce the toll of a changing climate. For example, we may not want to rebuild in some coastal areas that have been hammered by Sandy.

We’ll also need a stronger FEMA — which makes Romney’s past suggestions that FEMA be privatized particularly myopic.

(That’s almost as bizarre as Michael Brown, the FEMA director during Hurricane Katrina, scolding Obama for responding to Sandy “so quickly.”)

Democrats have been AWOL on climate change, but Republicans have been even more recalcitrant. Their failure is odd, because in other areas of national security Republicans pride themselves on their vigilance. Romney doesn’t want to wait until he sees an Iranian nuclear weapon before acting, so why the passivity about climate change?

Along with eight million others, the Kristofs have lost power, so I’ve been sending Twitter messages on my iPhone by candlelight — an odd juxtaposition that feels like a wake-up call. In the candlelit aftermath of a future hurricane, I’m guessing, we’ll look back at the silence about climate in the 2012 election and ask: “What were they thinking?”