While the left panics about my carbon footprint....

[Roscoe]

A record 30.5 billion tonnes of industrial, farming and human waste were dumped last year into China’s Yangtze River, the country’s longest, state media reported.

The quantity was twice as much as two decades ago and an increase of 900 million tonnes, or 3.1 percent, from the previous year, Xinhua news agency said late Tuesday.

The widespread dumping of industrial, agricultural and domestic waste has seriously polluted the Yangtze, a situation some ecologists warn will be worsened by the massive Three Gorges dam, which they say will create a “giant toilet bowl” of trapped sewage behind it.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071114...pHyhwAUQ2s0NUE

[CobraEd]

Are there no prisons? . . . Are there no workhouses?? . . . . Let them eat cake!!!


.

[427 S/O]

Did you know: the standard back yard septic system is 'still' the most efficient
form of waste disposal there is. When it's installed correctly! and, your property perks.

[bomelia]

You have to wonder why the Chinese let this situation go on as they do. Surely they know that pollution is a dead end. Maybe they could care less? Maybe they have plans of world domination... (politically, economically, militarily). I mean, if you knew a comet was going to strike the Earth in 5 years, and your only hope was to get to Mars, would you worry about cleaning up the mess you were making while building your escape vehicles?

OK, a stretch. I guess I am a bit of x-files fan. But China is, by sheer numbers, a force to keep an eye on.

Mike

[HI Cobra]

Mike,

You be right about that. They are just getting started.
Then there's India too!

[Wes Tausend]

...

Most of Chinese exports from China are not from Chinese owned factories. One would assume they are from world corporate entities that have moved there to escape, not only labor costs, but pollution restrictions as well. Some nations resist this "back door" avoidance policy by restricting imports ....since it isn't possible to presently forbid some well-heeled citizens from engaging in this form of free capitalism.

It makes me wonder if we, in the US, won't have to import almost all of our military supplies, if and when the next world war ensues. It's possible the "runaway corporate military industrial complex", that Ike warned us to fear, doesn't really care which country it finally headquarters in ...as long as the bottom line looks good. Sometimes I think Ike was the last conservative Conservative. We all know that liberals were never conservative.

I have a friend that works in a major US farm machinery factory that produces air seeders. Air seeders are, by far, the most efficient way to plant crops. Russia is ordering the machines by the thousands and has been doing so for some time. Russian "government" farming is not really that different than corporate farming, meaning a few are in control and an elite few benefit the most financially, workforce be damned. Russia has far more farmland, and probably other natural resources, than we do.

Our attention seems to be continuously diverted by irrelevant minor problems. As we play the fiddle with silly circus politics, it looks like not only the manufacturing sector is gradually moving off-shore, but the "breadbasket" as well. It won't hurt until our displaced and broken farmers have to sell all their land for urban housing ...and we buy not only all manufactured goods from overseas, but all food as well.

So what will we trade as money for all this importing? Well, for one thing, we can legally trade our US soil to non-citizens, to be used for urban housing of course, and rent it back from the new foreign owners.

The cost of rent? Whatever the new 800 pound gorilla wants, I suppose. I hope the looming shortage of petroleum doesn't affect the cost of vasoline too much.


...

[Ron61]

Well the river could always catch on fire like the one back East did a couple of times. After the last fire was out they decided it was time to clean it up and stop dumping everything into it.

Ron

[Roscoe]

That was not back East that was in Ohio.

The Cuyahoga River Fire of 1969

http://pratie.blogspot.com/2005/03/c...e-of-1969.html

[imagine2frolic]

To a person from California...... Ohio is back east

[Ron61]

You beat me to it. Roscoe must have been looking the wrong direction.

Ron

[cobra de capell]

Not only that, but the following article posted in Parade was very revealing:

"What's Really Heating up the Planet"

Coal-mine fires in China and India could be huge culprits in global warming. In China alone, up to 200 million tons of coal go up in flames each year—which may be equivalent to America’s total carbon-dioxide emissions from gasoline. India’s mine fires waste up to 10 million tons of coal annually. The pollution has made land in both countries uninhabitable. And the problem is expected to worsen.

Now experts are asking if controlling mine fires in Asia might be a key to reducing global warming. Economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth, for one, argues that it would likely be more efficient than offsets like planting trees or cleaning the ocean.

So, what can be done? One possible remedy being developed in the U.S. is a nitrogen-laced foam. It was used recently to put out a mine fire in West Virginia. (Emissions from coal-mine fires in the U.S. are a fraction of Asia’s.) Deploying such a successful foam in China and India—both of which would like help—could drastically reduce damage from long-burning fires, which are very difficult to extinguish fully.
_____

It's my understanding that even America has coal mines that have been burning since the 1960's.

From another article:

HANJING, China — One of China's lesser-known exports is a dangerous brew of soot, toxic chemicals and climate-changing gases from the smokestacks of coal-burning power plants.

In early April, a dense cloud of pollutants over Northern China sailed to nearby Seoul, sweeping along dust and desert sand before wafting across the Pacific. An American satellite spotted the cloud as it crossed the West Coast.

Researchers in California, Oregon and Washington noticed specks of sulfur compounds, carbon and other byproducts of coal combustion coating the silvery surfaces of their mountaintop detectors. These microscopic particles can work their way deep into the lungs, contributing to respiratory damage, heart disease and cancer.

Filters near Lake Tahoe in the mountains of eastern California "are the darkest that we've seen" outside smoggy urban areas, said Steven S. Cliff, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California at Davis.

Unless China finds a way to clean up its coal plants and the thousands of factories that burn coal, pollution will soar both at home and abroad. The increase in global-warming gases from China's coal use will probably exceed that for all industrialized countries combined over the next 25 years, surpassing by five times the reduction in such emissions that the Kyoto Protocol seeks.

The sulfur dioxide produced in coal combustion poses an immediate threat to the health of China's citizens, contributing to about 400,000 premature deaths a year. It also causes acid rain that poisons lakes, rivers, forests and crops.

Snip.....

Already, China uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. And it has increased coal consumption 14 percent in each of the past two years in the broadest industrialization ever. Every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego.

[Wes Tausend]

...

One of the reports I heard in 2006 said that China is building a new coal fired power plant every week ...for the next seven years.

There are coal veins in North Dakota that have been smoldering for years. Mentioned by Lewis and Clark, they were burning in the '50's when I saw them in the Badlands National Park area and likely also eons before L&C. Supposedly they were ignited by lightning, since many shallow veins appear on the ground surface and/or cutbanks that were washed out by clay erosion. The result of the burn in a bed of clay produces a red rock called scoria ( https://www.dmr.nd.gov/ndgs/ndnotes/ndn13_h.htm ) that is commonly used as road bed in local areas. The park is full of red rock. Some ND brick plants use lignite coal and local clay to produce quality manmade brick.

I also been told that one of the reasons power plants don't like to stockpile more coal is that they have to turn the pile every so often to prevent spontaneous combustion that occurs merely because of moisture in the coal, some of it occuring during mining and some from outside storage. Hmmm. Like storing wet hay.


...

[Ron61]

Wes,

This isn't quite along the same lines, but when I was a kid, and yes at one time I was young, I worked on a dairy farm during the Summer. They would pile the cow manure in big piles outside the barns and then load it onto manure spreaders and spread it over the pastures. One particularly hot day, one of the big manure piles blew up and scattered all over everything. They said it was from the methane gas building up in it and the heat. They had left it stacked to long. This I know because I had to spend a couple of hours helping clean up the mess.

Ron

[cobra de capell]

The awakening China will end up biggest contributor to 'stuff' in the air, even on the west coast. In 2004, almost 7,000 people died in coal mines and coal mines are not necessarily 'approved' to exist, they simply happen, along with power plants.

Something to think about - we have 304 million people, China 1.4 Billion, India 1.5 Billion. We are shipping jobs to China and India - I'm thinking at the end of the day, we are, in so many ways, screwed!