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."