Farming the Sea’s Wind

October 5, 2010

China’s goal to go green in the Middle Kingdom moves forward due to the wind and the sea along China’s long coast, which runs about 9,010 miles or 14,300 km.

“China has the largest wind resources in the world, and three-quarters of them are offshore,” Barbara Finamore, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Beijing office, told Scientific American.

China has an estimated offshore wind power potential of more than 750 gigawatts, far greater than the country’s land-based wind potential of 253 gigawatts. Source: UPI.com

Wind Daily says that China will be launching four offshore wind-power projects soon with a total installed capacity of 1,000 megawatts.

There’s an advantage having China’s government when it comes to cleaning the environment and creating green energy.  In the U.S., the first potential offshore wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts took nearly a decade for approval and still faces potential regulatory and judicial obstacles.

While the U.S. struggles to get clearance for its first offshore wind farm, the world’s largest offshore wind farm started producing energy September 2010 off the British coast with 300 megawatts, which is enough electricity to heat about 200,000 British homes. Source: Reuters.com

In China, the first offshore wind farm is near Shanghai and started supplying power to the city in July, 2010 with between 200 and 300 megawatts expected by the end of this year. Shanghai plans building 13 more offshore wind-power plants by 2020. Source: Offshore Wind.biz

Learn more about China Going Green

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Keeping the Rare Earths in China

October 1, 2010

At one time, it must have seemed like a good idea to allow China to process 90% of the earth’s supply for rare earth oxides/metals.

After all, rare earths are dangerous and costly to extract and the extraction methods used in China are highly toxic. The Economist reports that there have been horror stories about poisoned water supplies.

The thinking around the world must have been, “Better that China wrecks its environment than us.”


The Other Side of the Story

These rare earth-based metals are important in manufacturing sophisticated products such as flat-screen monitors, hybrid and electric-car batteries, wind turbines, aerospace alloys and high-tech weapons, which the U.S. needs to fight wars.

Then China became angry when Japan arrested a Chinese fishing boat captain whose trawler collided with a Japanese patrol boat in contested waters.

What China did to force the Japanese to do what China wanted caused the rest of the world to sit up.

China shut off the supply of rare earths to Japan.

A report from Reuters by Julie Gordon says this caused companies that depend on rare earths to struggle to secure a supply. It also woke up the rest of the world—a lesson learned that you don’t keep all the eggs in a basket that you don’t own.

See Hitting Endless Home Runs

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions

Leave a Comment » | business, capitalism, China, Chinese middle class, economy, environment, politics, science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Some Rules are Meant to be Broken

September 21, 2010

Global warming, fossil fuels with an expiration date, oceans turning acidic threatening life as we know it, polluted air and water, and the U.S. slogs along burdened with rules, regulations and red tape when it comes to the environment and green energy, which is necessary if we want our civilization to survive.

In China, that challenge doesn’t exist and Western countries and the World Trade Organization burdened with bureaucratic red tape are complaining.

The New York Times with Reuters writes a piece about Global Business and headlines it On Clean Energy, China Skirts Rules.

Who cares?  If China is getting the job done and that leads to cleaner air, water and energy, I say go for it.

In fact, the U.S. and other countries should look to China as a role model in this area. 

However, considering partisan politics in the U.S. and the GOP of “NO”, America may have already lost the race.

What does that mean in a century or two?

The New York Times piece I’m talking about was written by Keith Bradsher, and it was educational. 

By the time, I finished reading the long piece, I knew why the West isn’t weaning itself off oil any time soon, while China appears to be moving fast in that direction.

Why can’t the West play the game by China’s rules?

After all, according to Sun Tzu and the Art of War, which applies to business, you do what you must to win. 

If Western countries are so rigid they can’t adapt, that means another expiration date.

Also see China’s Going Green Challenge

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Limited Resources

September 18, 2010

There is a limit to the resources that support our modern consumer societies.

According to the Deccan Chronicle, “proven reserves of uranium will last less than 30 years.”

Science 2.0 asks, “When Will We Run Out of Fossil Fuels?”

There are many numbers in the Science 2.0 post.  What I’m quoting will be the “Arguably reasonable projections”, which is an estimate meaning that if they are wrong, we might run out sooner.

The earliest the world may run out of oil is about 2070 and the latest by 2105.

Natural gas depletion would be between 2061 and 2095.

For the end of coal, that estimate is between 2079 and 2155.

However, if nations like China and India continue to create the American lifestyle for as many as possible, those dates may be much shorter.

Sustainable Development says that water wars may be coming sooner. In case you haven’t heard, there is a growing shortage of fresh water in the world so this is another cause for concern.

End of the American Dream says we are close to a horrific global famine.

What happens when the resources that supports life as we know it cannot meet demands? Wars and much suffering!

See An Invasion of Fat

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

If you want to subscribe to this Blog, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Challenge of Evolution – Adapt or Perish

September 17, 2010

I’m reading Living With Evolution by K. D. Koratsky.  It’s heavy reading and reminds of university textbooks that threatened to put me to sleep while words blurred and paragraphs become forgotten broken records.

My usual reading time is a half hour or so before sleep and I was getting nowhere.

Then I came up with a tactic that worked.

In the morning when I peddle three miles on the stationary bike during daily exercise, I read from Koratsky’s book and what he says is riveting even if it is like slogging through thick oatmeal.

Koratsky has done his homework and the in-depth weaving of details covers the beginning of life billions of years ago and builds to today.

Too bad for the devoutly religious, who firmly believe that the universe and all life started about six thousand years ago with the wave of God’s magic wand.

It baffles me how people hold onto such beliefs. It must be fear and/or denial.

There is too much evidence that says otherwise, and Koratsky’s book spells it out in excruciating detail.

In addition, idealists who believe humanity can evolve into a peace-loving global community where no one suffers or goes hungry while crime is nonexistent and everyone is having fun is in for a BIG disappointment.

In chapter five, Koratsky writes about what happened after North America and South America bumped into each other millions of years ago and fused.

South America has been isolated for millions of years and there hadn’t been much of a challenge for the species that developed there so they had not evolved.

However, life forms in North America had been forced to evolve to survive contact with Asia and Europe and were stronger because of it.

Evidence shows that life from South America couldn’t compete with life from a stronger North America and was all but wiped out.

What I read caused me to think of the West’s invasion of China, which started with the Opium Wars early in the 19th century. 

Then for more than a century, the Chinese struggled to survive as the British Empire, the French, Germans, Portuguese, Russians, Japanese and Americans poured in and waged war with Chinese Culture threatening it with extinction.

To survive, China had to evolve or be swallowed by Western culture becoming a second class citizen.

After the Communists won the struggle against Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists in 1949, the metamorphosis began. Under Mao, China wove a cocoon around itself cutting off the world with the bamboo curtain.

During the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, China went through drastic and painful changes to evolve into a different civilization—one strong enough to survive in a brutal, complex, competitive modern world.

Some will disagree.  He or she will ask, “How can the horrors that took place in China under Mao be called part of the evolutionary process of survival?”

However, once you read about how species that cannot adapt with drastic environmental changes perish, the skeptics might understand what happened. 

Evolution and Mother Nature do not care about humanity or how many suffer. 

When the global environment changes drastically, death, destruction and extinction are a byproduct and humanity is not exempt from that process. 

See The Roots of Madness

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

If you want to subscribe to this Blog, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

Leave a Comment » | China, Chinese history, cultural differences, environment, history | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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