On the Heat Wave, El Nino and Real Consequences

Despite Bill McKibben's change of heart, the evidence that climate change is not a hoax seems to be rising.

Biman Mukerji and Diksha Sahni report from New Dehli for the Wall Street Journal, "Swaths of northern India are facing water shortages due to the late arrival of monsoon rains, deepening already acute power shortages and disrupting the sowing season of staple food crops at a time when India's economy is fragile."

The "Father of Hybrid Rice" is somebody that Chinese students learn about in their English textbook during the first year in senior middle school (aka high school). He made dramatic predictions about the potential for increased grain outputs in a speech in Changchun on Thursday, but sizzling weather may interfere with this. In Changchun, we have received uncharacteristically large quantities of thunderstorms and the temperatures have hovered around 90F for the last few days.

Codi Yeager reports for Circle of Blue:

A drought in China has also impeded crop production. Arable land totaling 5.17 million hectares (12.8 million acres) in Henan, Anhui, Shandong, and Inner Mongolia is being affected by the dry spell. Furthermore, 4.28 million people and 4.85 million heads of livestock in Yunnan, Hubei, and Inner Mongolia are short of drinking water, Xinhua reported. The Chinese government called for a Level IV emergency response plan to deal with the drought in Hubei Province, where city and county governments have allocated $US 1.2 million (7.72 million RMB) to ease shortages of drinking water and food.

The return of El Niño weather conditions could further parch China and the Korean Peninsula. The weather phenomenon, part of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) weather cycle that includes La Niña, is caused by warmer than normal water temperatures in the equatorial Pacific. El Niño generally brings droughts to Asia and Australia, while dumping rain on North and South America. 

Phoebe Sedgman and Elizabeth Campbell report for Bloomberg, "Goldman Sachs Group Inc. says this may be the first time in five years that New Zealand, the world’s biggest dairy exporter, produces less milk, at a time when surging corn prices are raising costs for U.S. farmers.... The heat wave wilting corn in the US Midwest is raising feed costs for farmers and may curb milk yields."

"Gone are the days that people in Suriname considered their country blessed by the gods against disastrous weather." (AlertNet, 28 Jun 2012)

N.B. It is quite difficult to find English articles in China about weather patterns and recent monthly weather data.

Part 1: Who Has The Power? The Li Family

The five major players in China's electric power generation industry, and their listed subsidiaries are all state-owned enterprises directly administered by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission. Their listed subsidiaries are substantially independent, hence counted as independent power producers, and are major power providers in their own right. Typically each of the big 5 has about 10% of national installed capacity, and their listed subsidiary an extra 4 or 5% on top of that. They are:

• China Datang Corporation parent of Datang International Power Generation Company (SEHK: 991; SSE: 601991)

• China Guodian Corporation ("Guodian") parent of GD Power Development Company (SSE: 600795),

• China Huadian Group parent of Huadian Power International Co., Ltd.

• China Huaneng Group parent of Huaneng Power International (NYSE:HNP)

• China Power Investment Corporation ("CPI") parent of China Power International Development Limited ("CPID", 2380.HK)

According to an old article (2007), three of these companies were in the top five power companies responsible for the most carbon dioxide emissions in the world. Updated information from the same source shows that China Huanneng Group now tops the list and China Huadian Group is third on the list. China Datang Corporation is now sixth on the list and Huadian Power International Corp. is now ninth on the list, followed by China Guodian Corporation at tenth. China Power Investment Corporation has fallen from fifth place to twelfth place and this story will be told below. The only American companies that are worse than China Power are Duke, AEP, and Southern Company.

Of the states and provinces in the world, the Great State of Texas is the only place worse than China's Provinces of Shandong, Jiangsu, Henan, Guangdong, and Shanxi. Put another way, Texas is the single biggest carbon producing province ("state") in the world and these Chinese provinces hold second through sixth place.

China Power International Development Limited

China Power International Development Limited (the "Company" or "China Power") was incorporated in Hong Kong with limited liability under the Companies Ordinance (Cap. 32 of the Laws of Hong Kong) on 24 March 2004 and is the flagship company of China Power Investment Corporation ("CPI Group"), one of the five largest power-generating groups in the People's Republic of China (the "PRC" or "China"). The power plants of CPI Group spread across 28 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions in the PRC with a controllable installed capacity of approximately 70GW.

China Power's executive is Li Xiaolin, daughter of Li Peng (aka "the Butcher of Tian'anmen" and the man who initiated the construction of the Three Gorges Dam on December 14, 1994). She was the center of a controversy recounted in an earlier post of mine. She was also featured five years ago in a Forbes piece: Chen, Jean (January 3, 2008). "China's Power Queen". Forbes (Hong Kong). 

Her brother--considered a "Princeling"--is the vice-governor of Shanxi Province and a graduate of Beijing's North China Electric Power University. He is the former chairman of Huanneng Power International, China’s largest independent power provider.

This is the structure of Xiaolin's CPI Group:

Much of this information is taken from Wikipeia and carma.org.

My Summer Plans and the Expansion of E-Vehicles in China

When I received this nice note from a fellow member of the the Beijing Energy Network, I jumped at the opportunity.

Dear BEN friends,

I am YAN Mi, from EU Delegation to China in Beijing, and am writing to invite you to the China Energy Trip 2012, which we are organizing for the third time this summer. 

The purpose of our program is to help young people from other countries to get to know the development and huge potential of energy markets in China by visiting government bodies, companies and universities. 

This summer we offer two modules (August 8-17, or August 19-27), covering renewable energy, cleantech and petroleum development. Participants can choose Modules A and/or B according to their interests. Also, some officials from the EU Delegation to China will participate in Module B.

Last summer, 18 foreign students from 11 countries and universities such as MIT, UC Berkeley, University of Oslo, IE Business School, SCIENCES-PO, and Dresden University of Technology participated. 7 graduate students from Harvard, Yale and University of Tokyo participated in 2010. 

The brochure with more details about the China Energy Trip 2012 can be downloaded here: http://sdrv.ms/KQJPPa

Thank you very much!
Kind Regards,

YAN Mi 

Please comment on the hyperlink to the description and let me know what you think I should glean from the experience. Also, if you want to make a gift to help underwrite this trip and my concomitant blogging, please click the Donate button on this page! The more I raise, the more I will write.

This article from Bloomberg is also an exciting development about more local (Changchun) efforts. Ecotality and China’s Changchun Eco-Power Technology Co. formed Tianjin Eco-Power Technology Co. to install chargers across China, according to a statement today. “China is rapidly expanding its leadership position in the electric vehicle market by implementing fleets and public transit applications that require high-power charging solutions,” Jonathan Read, chief executive officer of San Francisco-based Ecotality, said in the statement.

Dragon Boat Festival and Calligraphy

The Dragon Boat Festival (or Duan Wu Festival in Chinese) is on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. It is a day to remember the great poet Qu Yuan, who was a loyal official in the State of Chu in ancient China and deeply loved by his people.

Qu Yuan drowned himself on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month in 277 BC due to being unable to save his country. The local folk did what they could to search for him in the river, meanwhile they dropped dumplings of glutinous rice wrapped in bamboo or reed leaves into the river in order to prevent the fishes from eating Qu Yuan's body. Since that time, it has been customary on this day to eat zongzi (glutinous rice wrapped in bamboo or reed leaves) as a memorial to the patriotic poet.

Nowadays, zongzi is not only made for the Dragon Boat Festival. It is available at any time of the year, with a wide styles and varieties of dumplings. The main ingredient of zongzi is the glutinous rice, and then the bamboo or reed leaves -- the wrapping that makes zongzi taste distinct. The usual recipes include dates, sweetened red bean paste, meat, chestnuts, lotus seeds, dates, and yolk of egg. (See http://www1.chinaculture.org/library/2008-01/08/content_29449.htm)

The meat ones are my favorite, but are more common in the South. Here, dates are the most common filling and I am not wild about them. The other tradition is to wear five-color string bracelets. You can learn more about the traditions of Dragon Boat Festival at http://www.chinaculture.org/focus/focus/2010duanwu/2010-06/12/content_382549.htm.

A week or so ago, I finally purchased (for 100RMB) a rack for drying my maobi, or calligraphy brushes. This desk is dedicated to my calligraphy now.

More Stories from the Tea Market

“I feel my heart become so sympathetic, That I must have recourse to black Bohea…….”
                                                        - Don Juan, by Lord Byron (1788-1824)

Today, for the festival, I slept late and then my girlfriend and I went for a late lunch at my favorite restaurant, which serves mushroom hot pot. Then, we walked to Qing Yi Fang, the tea market that also sells plants and goldfish. We had a wonderful time and I was oblivious that they were supposed to close, but when we emerged, the hallway lights were out and most of the other stores had pulled down their shutters. I learned a lot. For instance, I learned about Ru Kiln which, during the Song Dynasty, produced pieces of porcelain for the emperor. The Emperor Huizon would "select 36 pieces of porcelain as his imperial products, and the remaining porcelain, whether good or bad, would be crashed to pieces without exception, with all such pieces buried deep in the earth, and might not be carried down by folks." (See www.gzhengfu.com)

The following entry from the Encyclopedia Britannica tells more of the story.

Ru kiln, Pinyin Ru yao, or Wade-Giles Ju yao,  kiln known for creating highly prized Chinese stoneware. The Ru kiln produced ware for a short period during the years when Northern Song emperors Zhezong (1085–1110) and Huizong (1110–1125) ruled.

No more than 60 intact pieces from the kiln were known before the discovery in 1986 of the original kiln site, which is in the village of Qingliangsi, in Baofeng county, Henan province. This site has yielded at least 37 more examples (22 of which are intact). The undecorated bluish or greenish gray glaze of Ru wares was cloudy and opaque, often with a slight lavender tinge and a fine, irregular network of cracks. The glaze typically covered a gray stoneware body that had a simple, elegant shape. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

I also learned about Lapsong Souchang Black Tea, or BOHEA (recall an from earlier post that what we call black tea in the West is called red tea in the East). This tea was popular in the 1600s and an ad from 1705 in Edinburgh purports to have sought 30 shillings for a single pound of the stuff. In the 1870s, production was quite high and then it trailed off to nothing by 1949. The company trying to sell me this kind of tea is certified organic in Japan and by the Germans and Americans. They have 120 staff who help to process 900 tons per annum. Of the 6000 mu in their plantation, 5000 are certified organic and the additional 1000 are under transition.

6,000 mu? Chinese still use many traditional measurements for distance, acreage and weight.

Abort the One-Child Policy?

A friend with whom I am not particularly well-acquainted asked me, today, a rather personal question, "Does being Catholic affect your view of the [one-child] policy? If so, how?" In case anybody else is curious, here is my considered answer. 

The local abortion hospital

Being Catholic affects my view of everything! The Church on Earth seems to think it has a special mission to focus on abortion and contraception, which I think is sexually deviant. The fullness and beauty and sanctity of life is preserved, consecrated, and respected in so many other equally important ways.

Over-population is one of the great pressures on the climate and natural resources that allow us to live healthy, happy lives. By any measure, China's confrontation of this great human predicament (i.e., climate change and environmental degradation) is a hundredfold more earnest than anything the United States' broken democratic system has been able to implement. This statement from the concluding remarks of a white paper, written in 1995, captures the Chinese government's intent behind the One-Child policy:

China is home to more than one-fifth of the world's population. It thoroughly understands the responsibility it bears in stabilizing world population growth and the essential role it should play. Family planning as an effective solution to China's population problems is more than just responsibility towards the well-being of the Chinese people and future generations; it is a duty owed to maintaining the stability of the world population. Working for the common interests of all of humanity, at the same time working for individual interests of each nation, the international community and each nation should work together to solve the population problems facing individual nations and the entire world. This will promote development and progress in every country and throughout human society.

Changchun's "family planning" hospital

I do not fault Vice-President Joe Biden (aka Gaffer-in-Chief) for his comments--"You have no safety net. Your policy has been one which I fully understand -- I'm not second-guessing -- of one child per family. The result being that you're in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people. Not sustainable." The bold part--er, not so bold part-- is often taken out of context and used by the right-wing media.

States--and the Church agrees--are sovereign and, therefore, China has a right to establish its own policies. I think pushing the Chinese government to abandon this ineffective and sometimes inhumane policy is only likely to make them dig in their heels and turn it into an issue of sovereignty and self-determination. One needs to understand ones opponent. To make stopping this draconian policy a principle goal of our foreign policy and central to the diplomatic discussions that the US has with China seems fool-hardy and not constructive. Although there is nothing more important, no more enduring value than the sanctity of life, we have other fish to fry in these consultations between our embassies.

On the other hand, I think presenting the Chinese leadership with well-reasoned and scientific data about the failures of One-Child is not likely to fall on deaf ears. One of the strengths of a state that is run by a clan of people who are actively atheistic is that they cannot rely on superstition or faith for the support of their decisions; they must rely on reason and logic.

Feng Wang of The Brookings Institute is only one thinker at one think-tank who has cogently made the case for relaxation of the policy.

An article in the New England Journal of Medicine, now almost seven years old, further outlines the weaknesses of this policy. The most interesting statement of these authors was, "First, relaxation of the policy can be considered only if fertility aspirations are such that a baby boom will not result." This is a brilliant, clear conclusion. The trouble is that we have no way of accurately measuring what they say in the next sentence, "There is now good evidence that China is becoming a small-family culture." The survey of almost 40,000 people upon which this inconclusive statement relies are inevitably poisoned by the inability of Chinese citizens to tell their government what they themselves want instead of what they think their government wants to hear.

Actually, the question that fascinates me is how China will use more social engineering to extricate itself from the problem that it has created for itself. Central planning is the hallmark of the Chinese communist system. One has to believe--with faith--that there are analysts, engineers and bean-counters wrestling with the big questions of gender balance and old-age dependency. One must also hope against hope that they will continue to crackdown on family planning officials who coerce women to make tragic choices. Forced abortion is illegal in China, even if a couple is in violation of the family planning policy.




Selected Bibliography
 
Therese Hasketh, Li Lu, and Zhu Wei Xing. 2005. "The effects of China's One-Child Family Policy after 25 Years", New England Journal of Medicine, 353, No. 11 (September 15): 1171–1176.

"China’s One Child Policy at 30". Brookings. 2010-09-24. Retrieved 2012-06-18.

New sheets and a new addiction to 圍棋

New Dragon and Phoenix flat sheet, duvet cover, and four pillowcases for 380RMB. Not bad!

I have started to play a lot of Capture Go! on-line at www.gokgs.com. I was turned on to the site two weeks or so ago when I spoke with my college adviser and dear friend, Professor John Elder. He has been playing weichi for years. I forgot to ask him what his most recent rank is, but I think retirement has been generous to his game.

I am thoroughly amused by the accidental condescension of the KGS website that states:

Now you have learned enough about go to play a simpler version of [the Game of Go/WeiChi], called "capture go." In capture go the two players play until one of them has captured a stone. The first player to make a capture wins! In real go, you keep playing after a capture, but for now let's just play until a capture is made.

On the board below, you can play your computer at capture go. The computer doesn't play very well, so after a few tries you should be able to win. You can play as many times as you want; once you think you really have capturing down pretty well, move on to the next page of the tutorial.

I have not found it easy to win every time. I have definitely played my first 100 games by now, I would guess, but even if I get good at this tutorial, which shows you the last move and any place where you are in 打吃 (aka atari [Japanese] or check [English]), when I play in real life there will be no computer to mark the stones thus. 

The porch of the fancy tea place near my house in Changchun.

Can you say, "Dork!"

Lifting two white stones in defeat.

 These are not my own pictures, but were taken by a friend.

Helen Caldicott, MD: China Nuclear Policy and Fukushima

Dr. Helen Caldicott

Dr. Helen Caldicott is one of the world's leading voices in opposition to the civilian and military use of nuclear material. The founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility (in 1985, PSR shared the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to IPPNW for building public awareness and pressure to end the nuclear arms race) and a mentor of mine, she gave a speech that prompted me to start Project Laundry List in 1995. She lives and gardens in Australia, but still travels extensively to speak to large audiences about the threat of nuclear power and weapons. She had the longest private meeting with Ronald Reagan during his time in office and reports that he frequently became anxious as she corrected him during the 75-minute conversation.

I sent her a list of questions and what is notable is the large number of times that she had to say, "I don't know." It is a reflection on the opacity of the Chinese government and the whole industry.

Since writing to Dr. Caldicott with these questions, there have been a couple major developments.

In today's New York Times, the International Energy Agency's executive director Maria van der Hoeven says, “Let’s be honest. If governments want to phase out nuclear power, they have to replace it with something else. If they’re going to replace it with renewables, that’s fine. If they are replacing it with coal, that’s not fine.”

China's top propaganda chief and a member of the 9-person Politburo, Li Changchun, has made a visit to the State Nuclear Power Technology Corporation in an effort to force the media here to "to assist the spread of common knowledge on nuclear power to foster an amiable environment for its development."

Also, the Wall Street Journal reported last Thursday, "China National Nuclear Power Co. said it is planning a Shanghai initial public offering that will go toward financing part of five power projects worth 173.5 billion yuan ($27.2 billion), in a multibillion-dollar deal that signals that the country's ramp-up of nuclear power is moving forward."

It also appears that Japan is moving too quickly towards reactor re-starts at Fukushima in a 'feudal' manner. The Boston Globe and The Guardian, as well as numerous other international newspapers of some repute have run articles about the strident plea of Prime Minister Noda to maintain Japan's standard of living by restarting nuclear power plants.

Anyway, let's get to the interesting part. Here are my questions and Helen's answers:

Visitors walk past China's second nuclear missile on display
as they visit the Military Museum in Beijing    Photo: GETTY

1. A. Where does the chain of command end in China?

Have no idea. Why don’t you find out?

B. Is Hu Jintao the only person who can order a nuclear strike? Is it technically possible in China (or any of the other nuclear powers) for somebody lower in the command chain to give the okay for a nuclear attack?

Don’t know any of this.

2. The Wikipedia article, People's Republic of China and weapons of mass destruction, offers a quite thorough assessment about what is known about China's nuclear arsenal. Is there anything you would like to add?

No, I know nothing more except at one point not too long ago they only had 20 missiles that could hit the US.
3. China is the only nuclear weapons state to give a security assurance to non-nuclear-weapon states, "China undertakes not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon States or nuclear-weapon-free zones at any time or under any circumstances." What efforts have been made to see the other four nuclear powers agree to something like this?

I don’t know, but they all reserve the right to use them and most are on hair trigger alert.

4. This article [Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris (November/December 2011 vol. 67 no. 6). "Chinese nuclear forces, 2011". Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. pp. 81–87.] also declares that, "Today, China is the only one of five original nuclear weapon states that is increasing its nuclear arsenal." Do you find this alarming?

Yes I do, but they are all in the process of “modernizing” their nuclear weapons. Why, I don’t know.

5. "The US government has complained for years that China is too opaque regarding its military forces and budgets and that it needs to be more open. It was therefore surprising and paradoxical that in its 2011 report on China’s military—one of the most widely used public sources for following Chinese nuclear developments—the Pentagon decided not to provide a detailed breakdown of the Chinese missile arsenal, as it had done in previous volumes. The Pentagon’s omission inadvertently assists Chinese nuclear secrecy." [Ibid.] Why do you think the Pentagon failed to include this and do you think it aids China with secrecy?

I would think that they do not want people to know so they can kind of demonise and invent stuff re the Chinese
6.  Lt. Gen. Ma Xiaotian, deputy chief of the People’s Liberation Army General Staff, reportedly acknowledged to American officials in 2009 that there were “areas of China’s nuclear program that are not very transparent” and declared, “It is impossible for [China] to change its decades-old way of doing business to become transparent using the US model” (Dorling, 2011). Do you agree with General Ma?

I really don’t know enough to comment, Alex.

7. This article explains the current reality here pretty well, China Doubles Down on Nuclear Power. Mainland China has 14 nuclear power reactors in operation, more than 25 under construction, and more about to start construction soon. China is rapidly becoming self-sufficient in reactor design and construction, as well as other aspects of the fuel cycle. Do you think that the Chinese leadership can be convinced to abandon these plans and embark on a safer course for their energy needs? Which leaders do you think are likely to guide the nation in a nuclear-free direction?

Don’t know any of the leaders, but I do know that China has developed deep reservations about nuclear power since Fukushima.

8. I arrived here a couple weeks before the tsunami in Japan and iodized salt was gone from the grocery stores in a matter of hours. What are the risks to Changchun, PRC, and the continuing world from the Fukishima Nuclear Reactors?

Well, if Building 4 collapses, god [sic] help everyone because the whole site will have to be evacuated, and it will be a radioactive catastrophe such that the world has never before see.

9. A. Will you be attending http://www.wna-symposium.org/? 

God almighty, no.

B. Is there any conference or event planned that can serve as an answer to this delegate rich symposium?

I think not.