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06 Nov 09
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China's New Disneyland Will Force 5,000 Families of Farmers Out of Their Homes Disneyland sure is a wondrous place--beloved characters, thrilling rides, an entire fantastic world where a child's imagination can run wild. It's fun for the whole family. Unless, that is, you happen to be one of the 5,000 families of poor farmers that... |
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05 Nov 09
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BYD Boss Wang Chuanfu Tops China's Rich List Thanks to Batteries & Electric Cars Money to Be Made Replacing Fossil Fuels
Wang Chuanfu (in Chinese: 王传福) founded BYD in 1995 at the tender age of 29. Now, 14 years later, BYD is the world's biggest manufacturer of mobile phone batteries and has been working on electric cars for... |
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04 Nov 09
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China, U.S., and Climate: An Interview with Yang Fuqiang, WWF's Director of Global Climate Solutions On Climate Change, "China has to say, this is my problem, and my solution"
For more than two decades, Dr. Yang Fuqiang has been a participant in the energy and climate change discussion in and around China. His career began as a researcher at the National... |
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03 Nov 09
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China Cleaning Up Two Toxic Spills on Yangtze River, Drinking Water Source of Millions Should Shipping on the Yangtze be Made Safer and Cleaner?
Even when everything's going according to plan, cargo ships can be major sources of air pollution (see "Just 15 of the world's biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world's 760m... |
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03 Nov 09
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The Best of Fast Company: China Dominates Texas Wind Power, Plastic Made Out of Algae, and the Future of Trucking This week at Fast Company, we looked at China's entry into the Texas wind power industry, Cereplast's plastic made out of algae, the long-term future of trucking, and a proposal to build floating cities in the Netherlands.
T. Boone Pickens scrapped his... |
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02 Nov 09
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Beijing Blanketed by Freak Government-Made Snow Flickr/Claire Evans
When we awoke on Sunday, we were shocked to find Beijing draped in snow. It was a gorgeous white Halloween, and the earliest snowfall in a decade -- the result in part of an unusually strong cold front that had a few of us thinking of... |
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02 Nov 09
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China's Climate Red Phone Has Two Lines: U.S. and Developing World Who They Gonna Call?
Last week, before hundreds of students and others gathered to call for government action on climate change, Beijing officials were busy talking with its two biggest climate interlocutors: India and the United States.
They weren't... |
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02 Nov 09
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"Chinese" Wind Farm in Texas: Green Jobs FAIL? photo: Chrishna via flickr
The buzz around the green blogosphere today is another record-setting Chinese wind farm, with 240 turbines producing 648 megawatts. But this one isn't in Inner Mongolia -- it's in Texas.
This $1.5 billion wind farm -- a... |
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30 Oct 09
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The Week in Pictures: International Day of Climate Action, Green Halloween, and More (Slideshow) A lot happened this week in green: from readers in the Hollywood Hills to our writers in Times Square, the International Day of Climate Action brought global awareness for climate change; we found out Chinese fruit bats demonstrate unusual sexual... |
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28 Oct 09
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Chinese Fruit Bats Demonstrate Unusual Sexual Behavior Never Before Seen in Adult Animals Greater short-nosed fruit bat feeding on kapok, photo: Wikipedia.
New research published in the online journal PLoS ONE demonstrates for the first time that a non-human adult animal species regularly engages in oral sex behavior. While the behavior has... |
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27 Oct 09
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Tigers Given a Bit More Breathing Room in Nepal - Bardia National Park Expanded photo: Claudio Gennari via flickr.
China may be doing little to stop the illegal tiger trade, but Nepal has just taken some action to protect its tigers: WWF reports that the Bardia National Park has just been expanded by some 900 square kilometers (350... |
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27 Oct 09
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Illegal Logging Makes Indonesia World's Third Largest Emitter of Greenhouses Gases After U.S. and China...
Indonesia is made up of 17,508 islands, most of which were totally covered by forest until about 50 years ago when that number dropped to 80%. But now, illegal logging and the burning of forests are making the country the third... |
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27 Oct 09
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China Failing to Stop Gangster's Tiger Trade - Investigators Offered Many Leopard Skins Too Tiger skin in Lhasa, photo: EIA
The illegal trade in tiger and other big cat skins and body parts is big business for international crime syndicates, with tiger skins fetching up to more than $21,000 each. Now, an undercover mission by the Environmental... |
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26 Oct 09
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Why Are Children In China Saluting Cars? Du Bin for The New York Times
The The New York Times ran this photograph and says that it was all about traffic safety.
"Education officials promoted the saluting edict to reduce traffic accidents and teach children courtesy. Critics, who have posted... |
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26 Oct 09
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Nadav Kander is Winner of Prix Pictet Photography Prize 2009 Image from Prix Pictet: Chongqing IV (Sunday Picnic)
The Prix Pictet is the new global photography prize that focuses on sustainability. Sponsored by Pictet & Cie, a Swiss bank, and in its second year, this year's theme is the earth. Last year it was... |
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25 Oct 09
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With Words, Hip Hop and Hundreds of Bicycles, Beijing's Youth Call for Climate Action A series of talks in Beijing between the US and China over a climate deal was capped by a resounding call for action -- not from top officials but a more unusual constituent: young Beijingers.
The city's celebration of the 350.org International Day of... |
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22 Oct 09
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Edward Burtynsky's Devastating "Oil" (A Slideshow) A landscape photograph by Edward Burynsky can be as frozen as it is arresting. But stare at his portraits of China's Three Gorges Dam or the Alberta tar sands, and you can almost make out Earth in motion. In his massive prints, the built and natural... |
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22 Oct 09
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India and China Create Alternative Climate Treaty Image via Manasclerk
The two biggest polluters of the developing world have drafted an 'alternative' to the UN's climate treaty. It's an agreement to work together on climate issues, to reduce greenhouse gases and share clean technology. The deal could... |
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21 Oct 09
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How Beijing Cleans Its Air, and Fakes It Too As savvy moves by officials in China are pushing its state-run English-language news outlets to start sounding a bit more like their Western counterparts, did a New York Times article over the weekend about improvements to air quality in Beijing bear... |
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20 Oct 09
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Chinese Town's Response to Poisonous Lead Factory: Move the Town Increasingly, concern over environmental health in cities and towns across China has led to angry public protests that have halted construction on or closed a number of factories. But after outrage over lead poisoning in a town in central China,... |
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19 Oct 09
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Carbon Capture Is "Essential" for Developing World, And Still a Pipe Dream Proposed GreenGen IGCC coal plant in Tianjin, China
Unproven and Expensive
Here's a climate conundrum. Last week, the International Energy Agency said that to avoid climate catastrophe, 2,000 carbon capture and sequestration (so called "clean coal")... |
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16 Oct 09
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A Chinese Photographer's 'Infernal Landscapes' Photograph by Lu Guang via National Press Photographers Association.
Freelance photojournalist Lu Guang's unflinching images of AIDS victims in China's Henan province, honored in the World Press Photo contest for 2003, succes...Read the full story on... |
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15 Oct 09
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Multinationals Are Flaunting China's "Most Basic" Pollution Law Top multinational and Chinese companies are not reporting what pollutants they are releasing into China's air and water, as a new law requires, according to a report by Greenpeace.
Among the eighteen companies cited were eight of the world's top 500... |
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13 Oct 09
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World's First Drive-Through Museum Coming to China From the Just What We Needed Dept.
Combining China's growing enthusiasm for private museums with its increasing appetite for driving, the new Nanjing Automobile Museum is set to be the world's first drive-through museum.
Visitors drive their cars around... |
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10 Oct 09
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Best of Infrastructurist: Floating Trains, The World's Sexiest Bus Stop and 15 Hot New Careers In Infrastructure From The Infrastructurist, a round-up of some of the best recent posts:
Look Who's Building Floating Trains...
Trains that levitate on magnetic tracks have been the future of transportation for decades--but with one operating successfully in China now... |
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08 Oct 09
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Thousands of Homeowners Sick from Toxic Chinese Drywall Photo via Chinese Drywall Atty
During the housing boom, thousands of homes were built with cheap drywall imported from China. The drywall turned out to be contaminated with sulfur, and was powerful enough to corrode metal and make anyone living in the... |
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08 Oct 09
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Bangkok Showdown: China, Rich Countries Spar Over Climate Obligations Cutting Remarks
Yesterday, at a mock trial that found the U.S. and other wealthy nations responsible for climate change, China was all but absent.
But in the real world of climate negotiations, China was critical of developed countries' insistence that... |
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07 Oct 09
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Nuclear Power: Climate Fix or Folly? Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
Can nuclear-generated electricity lead us off fossil fuels?
After years of sitting in the energy dustbin, nuclear power is enjoying a renaissance. Countries such as France, Germany, Japan and China are furiously building... |
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05 Oct 09
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Is China, Once Climate Scapegoat, Now Our "Sputnik"? Not two years ago China was often decried as the world's environmental waste land.
Suddenly however it's "the Sputnik of our day," as Tom Friedman wrote last week in one of two buzz-wordy columns praising green efforts in China that could put the rest... |
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05 Oct 09
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China Says US & Rich Nations Sabotaging Climate Treaty photo: UNFCCC
At UN climate talks in Bangkok -- the second to last talks before the COP15 summit in Copenhagen -- the Guardian reports that China's special representative on climate change has accused the United States other industrialized nations of... |
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29 Sep 09
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EU & US Look to Eliminate Import Tariffs on Green Goods - Try to Woo China Into Global Climate Deal photo: Douglas Cataylo via flickr.
Helping the flow of low-carbon technologies around the world, in particular from developed to developing countries, is really a key part of forging a global climate deal. Well, here's some good news on that front:... |
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29 Sep 09
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China Buys 80 Very High Speed Trains (236 mph) for $4 Billion Photo: Bombardier
What's the US Doing?
The Chinese Ministry of Railways has announced that it will buy 80 "very high speed trains" from Bombardier's Chinese joint ventre Bombardier Sifang to add to China's fast-growing network of high-speed rail. The... |
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28 Sep 09
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Compared to China & Brazil, the US is Climate Illiterate, Scientist Says Graphic from the Washington Post on how different nations ranked the importance government should place on climate change. Note the US on the left...
The following frankness doesn't happen often enough in the international climate change debate: Reuters... |
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24 Sep 09
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Industry Leaders Consider Why America has Fallen Behind at the National Climate Summit Recent announcements that China would be dramatically curbing carbon emissions and investing heavily in nuclear and renewable energy highlighted a central theme of the Council on Competitiveness' National Energy Summit: that the United States had fallen... |
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23 Sep 09
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Are China and U.S. Headed For a Copenhagen Deadlock? Even after President Obama's firm acknowledgment of American responsibility for climate change and Chinese President Hu's announcement of a carbon intensity target yesterday, the prospects for a deal on carbon emissions at Copenhagen in seventy days... |
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22 Sep 09
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China Will Cap Emissions Intensity: Your Move, U.S. With the world watching, China's president Hu Jintao offered his country's biggest climate change initiative yet at the UN this morning, saying China would establish emissions intensity targets --not absolute targets, but cuts in emissions per unit of... |
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22 Sep 09
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Oops! Montreal Protocol Solutions May Be Causing Global Warming Old refrigerators line sidewalk in Havana, Cuba - to be replaced by new ones from China. Could these guys be partly responsible for our climate change problem? Image via: Marco Traverso on Flickr. com
The Montreal Protocol, signed in 1987, had the very... |
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22 Sep 09
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China and the U.S. Could Fix Climate -- If Leaders Let Them: Duke Energy CEO at Climate Week NY°C Chinese and American companies are eager to find ways to cooperate and work with each others' country, provided their governments support them, Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, said at a Climate Week NY°C panel discussion on China-US energy issues today... |
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16 Sep 09
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China Says Keeping World Temp from Rising 2C is Unrealistic Photo via Fladoodle
A couple of months ago at the disappointing Major Economies Forum in Italy, one of the bright spots was that the world's most polluting nations nonetheless agreed to keep the temperatures from rising an average of 2 degrees Celsius... |
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16 Sep 09
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Say What?! Feds Tell IT Execs to Trash Mobile Phones After Visiting China Photo via bvsciguy
US government officials are concerned about potential security threats for IT executives for software development companies who are visiting China. They lend advice like weighing your laptop before your return. A bit worse is their... |
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12 Sep 09
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Parts of China Now Have Per Capita Emissions To Rival the West: Nicholas Stern China is the world's leading CO2 polluter but it often relies on per capita emissions data to show that its footprint -- and thus its responsibility to manage climate change -- is much lighter than that of developed countries.
But on Friday Nicholas... |
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11 Sep 09
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Wind Power Could Supply All of China's Electricity by 2030, Harvard Study Says photo: Diego Silvestre via flickr
A new study coming out of Harvard University's School of Engineering and Applied Science shows that with the proper investment China could easily ditch its coal burning, carbon emitting ways and be entirely wind powered... |
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11 Sep 09
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Seeing a $1 Trillion Market, China-U.S. Greentech Initiative Could "Take Over the World" Ahead of possible agreements between the U.S. and China at Copenhagen, official partnerships have been challenged by trade tensions and acrimony, with both countries floating protectionist threats, and China, like India, demanding that the U.S. pony up... |
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08 Sep 09
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World's Biggest Solar Plant will Power 3 Million Homes Photo of another First Solar plant in Nevada
It seems every few months another 'world's biggest' renewable energy project gets unveiled--but this one's seriously huge. The US company First Solar has just signed a deal with the Chinese government to... |
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08 Sep 09
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Should E-Bikes Be Banned? 4 Lessons From Asia's E-Bike Craze People-powered versus electric powered - it all goes in the same lane in China. Photo avlxyz via flickr.
The Dutch bought more e-bikes during the first part of 2009 than they did regular bicycles. In Asia, e-bikes have enjoyed run-away sales for some... |
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05 Sep 09
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Hoarding As An Art Form: Song Dong's "Waste Not" Photos: Alex Pasternack
Something worth checking out this holiday weekend if you're in New York: Chinese artist Song Dong's "Waste Not," an installation at the Museum of Modern Art made up of most of the objects obsessively collected by the artist's... |
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04 Sep 09
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US-China Bilateral Climate Deal Likely in November, Senator Says photo: Beth Rankin via flickr
It's well known now that the US and China have had plenty of behind-the-scenes climate talks, but here's something really tantalizing: The New York Times |
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03 Sep 09
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Anti-Pollution Rioters Clash with Police in China Photo via WizBangBlue
There's been much reportage done on the rapidly declining state of the environment in China--badly contaminated lakes, heavily polluted air, dangerous sewage runoff, the list goes on. It was only a matter of time before the Chinese... |
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02 Sep 09
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Shanghai Pavilion is Built From Recycled CD Cases Archdaily via Inhabitat
Bridgette at Inhabitat is dazzled by the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion by Atelier Feichang Jianzhu, being built for the Shanghai World Expo being held next year. Its exterior is made from recycled CD cases (no doubt those... |
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01 Sep 09
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China Tightens Grasp on Rare Earth Metals Vital for Green Technologies A mine in China's Baiyun Erbo Rare Earth Development Zone, home to half the world's rare earth production
China is famous for mining one of the yuckiest, costliest and deadliest natural resources. But it's also home to 93 percent of global production of... |
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