[StarvingLion]

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3147 ... pocalypse#

June 21, 2015

Excerpts:

"China's leaders thus face an intractable dilemma. They can't keep growing the economy without consuming ever more coal, oil and gas. Yet the more fossil fuels they burn, the more uninhabitable China's cities become, the more Chinese people flee the country, and the faster China's emissions are driving global warming."

"Yet the most worrisome threat to reducing emissions comes from the government's newest plan to "clean up its cities" by building dozens of huge "coal-gasification bases" in Shanxi, the Ordos Basin, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and other remote areas. These plants will burn coal directly to generate electricity in situ and convert coal to liquid fuels like "syngas" (like natural gas but from coal), which will then be transported to the cities to be burned in power plants, factories and cars.

These huge bases, some encompassing areas larger than the states of Delaware and Connecticut, will be the largest fossil fuel development projects in the world. And far from reducing coal use, scientists say, these complexes consume so much coal-fired energy to produce the syngas and other chemicals that they generate almost twice as much carbon dioxide emissions as if the coal were just directly burned in power plants. (31) Furthermore, water-intensive coal extraction in the new coal bases in northern and western provinces threatens to seriously aggravate China's already severe water crisis in these regions. (32) And as if all this weren't enough, the government has also declared its intention to develop "fracking" wherever possible in China."

"For the first time in its history, China now imports more grain than it produces. This is bad news not only for China's basic food security but also for natural resources around the world as China's demand for soybeans, corn, wheat and other grains is leveling forests from Africa to the Amazon."

"In December 2013, the Ministry of Land and Resources reported that 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres - roughly the area of Belgium) of China's farmland is too polluted to grow crops on and researchers said that "as much as 70 percent" of China's farmland could be contaminated to some degree. (46) In April 2014, the government reported that almost 20 percent of the country's arable land, 10 percent of its woodlands and 10 percent of its grassland soils were seriously polluted with heavy metals, such as cadmium, mercury, arsenic, lead, chromium, zinc and nickel plus inorganic compounds including DDT."

"Shocking as this is for a nation that must try to feed 20 percent of the world's population on 7 percent of the world's arable land, environmentalists suspect the published figures understate the true extent of soil contamination. (48) In November 2014, the government conceded that 40 percent of the nation's farmland is degraded from acidification, pollution and erosion, and the government "is growing increasingly concerned about its food supply after years of rapid industrialization resulted in widespread pollution of waterways and farmland.""

"The China Geological Survey reported in 2013 that 90 percent of the country's groundwater is polluted, and 60 percent of it is "severely" polluted. A survey of 11 cities across China in 2012 indicated that 64 percent of water sources were severely polluted and 33 percent moderately polluted. Only 3 percent of sources could be graded as clean."
"In the boom years of the 1990s and 2000s in China's ruling class, taking their cue from New York banksters who were becoming their partners and backers, corruption flourished on a previously unimagined scale. They siphoned huge sums from state banks, SOEs and ministries. They looted pension funds and state charities. They've profited from illegal arms sales and smuggling. They made vast fortunes in real estate evicting millions of farmers and selling their land to developers. "

The Bank of China, China Development Bank, the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China and other huge state banks sit at the apex of China's economy and count among the Global Fortune 500 largest companies. But unlike Citibank or HSBC, their job isn't to make money. Their job is to lose money or more precisely, to disburse it.

"It's often said that in the transition to capitalism China's market reformers "abandoned central planning." That's an exaggeration. They reduced the scope of indicative planning but they did not abandon planning the state sector; they monetized it. Instead of issuing physical output targets à la Stalin and Mao, they direct most of the state economy by writing checks: by ordering state banks to disburse funds to support the production goals of the state plans (though they still set physical targets for some items - kilometers of rails, kilometers of roads, tons of wheat and cotton etc., as noted above)."

"China has to be the first nation in history in which significant numbers of its own triumphant ruling class are abandoning their own success story en masse"

"Surveys show that half of China's rich (most of whom are Communist Party members) have either left the country or are planning to do so as soon as they can."

"International banking connections also have been key to the princelings' strategy of getting their loot out of China. Over the years, it has been estimated that princelings and other high cadres, cronies and capitalists have funneled $1-4 trillion in unreported assets out of the country since 2000."

[Timo]

StarvingLion's irrelevance is imminent.

!!!

[Withnail]

StarvingLion's irrelevance is imminent.

!!!

Aren't there 1.3 billion people in China?

I keep hearing these claims from Western shills that 'people are fleeing China'.

Seems like there's a fuck ton of Chinese who actually aren't doing that.

[kiwichick]

@ wn

we are getting some of them migrating to New Zealand; averaging 5000+ over the last 4 years

there is an ongoing "discussion" about non NZ citizens buying property in NZ , with the Chinese being targeted as a cause of the ongoing rise in house prices here.

of cause the Chinese are only part of the migration to NZ

last year net migration was a record 57,000

[Withnail]

@ wn

we are getting some of them migrating to New Zealand; averaging 5000+ over the last 4 years

there is an ongoing "discussion" about non NZ citizens buying property in NZ , with the Chinese being targeted as a cause of the ongoing rise in house prices here.

of cause the Chinese are only part of the migration to NZ

last year net migration was a record 57,000

Drop in the ocean then.

[StarvingLion]

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/2722 ... nt-dilemma

"China, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia are scrambling to suck out the oil under the South China Sea. Even Ecuador is opening its previously off-limits Yasuni Biosphere Reserve to drilling by Chinese oil companies. Around the world, we're consuming oil like there's no tomorrow. And not just oil, everything. Industrialized and industrializing nations are ravenously looting the planet's last resources - minerals, forests, fish, fresh water, everything - in what Michael Klare calls "the race for what's left" in his eponymous book."

"Extreme extraction is driven by extreme production and consumption. Around the world, resource consumption is growing at several multiples the rate of population increase, driven by the capitalist engines of insidious commodification, incessant invention of new "needs," daily destruction of existing values by rendering more and more of what we've already bought disposable and replaceable, and, of course, by the insatiable appetites of the global 1%. Today, the global rich and the middle classes are devouring the planet in a kind of après-moi-le-déluge orgy of gluttony. Russian oligarchs party on yachts the size of naval cruisers. Mideast oligarchs build refrigerated cities in the middle of baking deserts. China's newly rich consume not the usual baubles only, but also the world's last tigers, rhinoceroses, elephants, bears, pangolins and other rare exotic creatures, along with the last tropical forests - on an industrial scale."

"China's Ministry of Housing admits that many of the "tofu" and "fast food" apartment blocks that builders have thrown up in the building boom of recent years are so shabby "they can only last 20 or 30 years.""

"A recent survey found that 40 percent of the rice served in Guangzhou restaurants was tainted with cadmium, a highly toxic heavy metal with serious health implications. Why? Because industrial plants including battery makers for those electronic devices and vehicles, the source of the cadmium, have been built right next to rice paddies. This is everywhere in China."

"I just do not see how China can put the brakes on its own ecological self-destruction, the destruction of the health of its people, and rein in the country's surging carbon dioxide emissions without closing down most of those industries. "

We're riding a global engine of ravenous resource consumption. We all know this can't go on forever, but the thought that it might come to a stop is so terrifying to all of us that most of the time we just want to live in denial. No wonder even many eco-socialists resist accepting the need to "degrow" the economy because, under capitalism, that would mean not just austerity, but starvation.

This is the tragedy of capitalism versus the environment. What we need to do to save the humans tomorrow means economic collapse and mass unemployment today.

Green jobs are fine, as far as they go. But I don't see many millions of jobs polishing solar panels. And when I've visited windmill farms, there's no one around. We certainly can't save the world by producing millions of electric cars instead of millions of gasoline cars because they're both polluting and both consume too many resources.

[StarvingLion]

The purpose of this thread is to mock the currently pursued Green Economy in its various forms and mixes (Solar + Windturbines, Natural gas, Contemporary Nuclear, CCS) which will completely destroy Western Civilization because it doesn't address the fundamental economic problem: exotic materials are absolutely necessary in tandem with zero carbon energy source. Why? Two reasons. One is below, the other is batteries cannot be made from certain common "economic" elements that will destroy the earth

We have to get nuclear power from thorium whether we like it or not. We can't have a hi-tech green energy world without digging up radioactive thorium to leach out the heavy Rare Earth Elements such a world requires. It is simply unprofitable to mind REE's in the west without making economic use of the byproduct of mining REE's, which is Thorium. Thorium is plentiful, and in a post-peak mineral world, plentiful is important. We are being lied to about green energy so that we don't have to think about lowering energy use. China is going to build 400 nuclear plants in 35 years. China and India are on a crash course to be the first to produce commercial power from thorium.

[StarvingLion]

Here is what happens when you build batteries the wrong way:

Graphite is used in all of our so-called “green” powered batteries and is mined in China emitting deadly fine air particles resulting in a lethal smog that washes down from the skies in an ash laden rain that covers crops and water. China recently shut down several graphite mines because of the pervasive smog. Graphene, a nano-material produced for batteries, is water soluble and can cut through human/animal cells. Both graphite dust and graphene are deadly to humans because of their small size. You don’t want to breathe this stuff.

[americandream]

Good find SL