Contaminated Water and Soil is a Global Problem – Part 6/6

February 20, 2012

RUSSIA

The CIA Factbook says of Russia’s ‘Environment – current issues’ that “air pollution from heavy industry, emissions of coal-fired electric plants, and transportation in major cities; industrial, municipal, and agricultural pollution of inland waterways and seacoasts; deforestation; soil erosion; soil contamination from improper application of agricultural chemicals; scattered areas of sometimes intense radioactive contamination; groundwater contamination from toxic waste; urban solid waste management; abandoned stocks of obsolete pesticides”


Toxic Dzerjinsk

The CIA says Russia’s land area covers 16,377,742 sq km. Arable land covers 7.17% of that area while permanent crops cover only 0.11%  with irrigated land covering 43,460 square km.

As one of the most polluted cities in the world, “Dzerzhinsk, Russia’s toxic groundwater contamination  has reduced the average life expectancy to 42 for men and 47 for women.” Source: World Resource Institute

Pollution Issues.com says says, “An area of Karabache, Russia, where soil has been poisoned by high concentrations of lead, arsenic, nickel, cobalt, and cadmium.”


The City That Kills It’s People

Wikipedia says of Russia’s environment and water, “While Russia possesses vast mineral and energy wealth, this does not come without some price both to Russia and to the greater globe. Particularly, oil and gas extraction exacts a heavy cost to the health of the land and people. Drilling waste water, mud, and sludges are accumulated, annual volumes have been estimated at 1.7 million tons of chemical reagents contaminating 25 million cubic meters of topsoil.”


Crude Oil Pollution Exposure Kills Whole Families with Cancer in Russia

Country Data.com says, “Russia devotes about 10 percent of its land to agriculture, but land quality is declining. Erosion carries away as much as 1.5 billion tons of topsoil every year. In the past twenty-five years, Russia’s arable land area has decreased by an estimated 33 million hectares, with much of that loss attributable to poor land management. Experts fear that agricultural land management may deteriorate further under Russia’s new land privatization as individual farmers try to squeeze short-term profit from their new property

“In Russia an estimated 74 million hectares of agricultural land have been contaminated by industrial toxic agents, pesticides, and agricultural chemicals. Considerable land also is lost in the extraction of mineral resources. Unauthorized dumping of hazardous industrial, chemical, and household waste takes land out of production. Flooding is a problem near the Caspian Sea and in Stavropol’ Territory, where the construction of reservoirs has removed land from use.”

________________________

This comment was originally posted at Discovering Intellectual Dishonesty – Part 6 on January 31 at 23:34 by an anonymous reader called Bosshard.

Deceit upon deceit?

Dear author, what we find most annoying in the behavior of others are those same behaviors of which we are equally guilty. You appear to dislike: lies, half truths and manipulation.

Regarding water-

You have much to learn.  Boiling water is good for killing bacteria and the like but does nothing to stave off the ill effects of heavy metals like copper, lead and the like. According to the BBC, at least 10% of all Chinese land is contaminated with heavy metals, which are not rendered inert by boiling. Thus, boiling water in China does no good when these elements are present.

When you made your comment, were you engaging in ““willful deception and a refusal to play by the rules?” when you state that boiling Chinese water is an anti-dote?

And an aside, do you personally drink the same water as the folks in Guizhou or Gansu, or do you purchase bottled water, a thing many of them cannot do?

As for your forgone conclusion that the need for water is greater than that of religion, I would disagree. Freedom of religion is paramount to many souls, just ask the Tibetans who will take their own lives in order to achieve such an end. If I were forced to give up my religion for water, I would not do so.

Please do not pretend to know the mind of the masses when yours may not be as open as you may believe.

This site has much information, but the author, like the Jesuits of old appears to have conjured up a China that he wishes us to believe in. The brutal reality of the communist regime  and havoc it brings to its people can best be understood by reading books like Empire of Lies, The Beijing Consensus, Poorly Made in China, The Party, and a host of others.

I will not return to this comment nor website but would like to offer this question:

If you have lived in China, and all of your readers, then you truly know the truth of this place. And if you truly know the truth of this place, then do you think it’s right to knowingly deceive the people about it?

God bless and keep all His children safe and informed.

_____________________________________________

Note from Blog Host: And when China announced that 10% of its agricultural land was contaminated with heavy metals and the CCP plans to do something about it, the critics (such as Bosshard) condemn and criticize.  It is a shame!

 

Return to Contaminated Water and Soil is a Global Problem – Part 5 or start with Part 1

______________

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.

Subscribe to “iLook China”
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.

About iLook China

5 Comments | America, China, environment, India, science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Contaminated Water and Soil is a Global Problem – Part 4/6

February 18, 2012

CHINA

Bosshard said in the comment, “According to the BBC, at least 10% of all Chinese land is contaminated with heavy metals, which are not rendered inert by boiling. Thus, boiling water in China does no good when these elements are present.”

I question who reported that China’s contaminated land was 10% of all the land or just the farmland that is irrigated. Often, the way a story about China is reported, may taint the public’s opinions.

Tree Hugger.com reported on this topic and says, “Though no doubt much is lost in translation, this story just out of China, carried by AFP and other outlets, asserts that, “About 10 percent of China’s farmland contains excessive levels of heavy metals due to contaminated water and poisonous waste seeping into the soil, state media said Monday, citing a government survey.

“Accuracy of the 10% assessment is probably quite low; but, point taken. I doubt it possible for consumer product factory emissions to have created a situation where 10% of the land surface was evenly contaminated by heavy metals. A very different interpretation makes more intuitive sense.

“It’s Coal.

“Lead mercury and cadmium are commonly found in coal, and Chinese coal is notoriously heavily laced with toxic metals.”

So, the answer to my question was that this was reported by China’s state media and then the Western media ran with the story until Bosshard says that 10% of all of China’s land was contaminated when it fact it was only 10% of the farmland.


If you watch this video, you will discover that water pollution is no secret in China.

Then the next question I have is where is most of this pollution taking place.  Well, the CIA Factbook says China’s land area covers 9,569,901 square km. Arable land covers 14.86% of that and permanent crops are on 1.27% of the land. Irrigated land covers 641,410 sq km.

For ‘Environment – current issues’, the CIA says, “air pollution (greenhouse gases, sulfur dioxide particulates) from reliance on coal produces acid rain; water shortages, particularly in the north; water pollution from untreated wastes; deforestation; estimated loss of one-fifth of agricultural land since 1949 to soil erosion and economic development; desertification…”

What is China doing about ground water pollution control? So far, only the United States and Europe are working on this challenge. However, according to the CCP, China is joining the battle to clean up contaminated ground water.

On November 8, 2011, the Ministry of Water Resources of the People’s Republic of China  made public that “China has introduced the country’s first national plan on groundwater pollution control, urging a combination of legal, economic, technological and administrative measures for groundwater protection.”

“The ministries of environmental protection, land and resources, and water resources announced Friday at a press conference that the State Council, or China’s Cabinet, has already approved the national plan on groundwater pollution control for 2011-2020.

“China will invest a total of 34.66 billion yuan (around 5.48 billion U.S. dollars) on the prevention and treatment of pollution in the country’s groundwater in 2011-2020, according to the plan.

“The money will go to six categories of projects, including survey, prevention, remediation of groundwater pollution, control of pollution in underground drinking water sources, agriculture-related groundwater pollution control, and underground water environment monitoring capacity building.

“Currently, municipal sewage, household garbage, industrial wastes and seepages of fertilizers and pesticides have caused glaring pollution to groundwater in some parts of China, seriously affecting economic production and people’s lives, according to ministry officials at the conference.”

That doesn’t sound like some sort of dirty CCP secret to me. The reason the Western media knows about China’s ground water contamination, is because China announced it. The China Daily also reported this story October 29, 2011.

However, public knowledge of ground water contamination in China goes back twenty years. In addition, “According to a scientific sampling, 150 million mi (100,000 square kilometers) of China’s cultivated land have been polluted, with contaminated water being used to irrigate a further 32.5 million mi (21,670 square kilometers) and another 2 million mi (1,300 square kilometers) covered or destroyed by solid waste. In total, the area accounts for one-tenth of China’s cultivatable land, and is mostly in economically developed areas.” Source: Wikipedia – Soil Contamination

Zhou Shengxian, director of State Environmental Protection Administration, announced on July 2006, “It is estimated that nationwide 12 million tons of grain are polluted each year by heavy metals that have found their way into soil. Direct economic losses exceed 20 billion yuan (about 2.5 billion U.S. dollars). Soil pollution has worsened. According to incomplete statistics, about 150 million mu (10 million hectares) of arable land in China has been polluted.”

In addition, China has joined with Alterra to coordinate a major national multidisciplinary programme to map and contain the environmental risks in the Yangtze delta and the Pearl River delta… The goal of this collaborative project is to link together the various projects and enhance the scientific input. Joint research is being conducted into the use of crops to reduce the risks posed by areas of land contaminated with heavy metals.”

The partners in this project are:

  • Soil Science Centre, Soil Chemistry and Nature team, Alterra (coordination)
  • Soil Quality chair section, Environmental Sciences Department, Wageningen University
  • Institute of Soil Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISSCAS), Nanjing, China
  • Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic (informal participation with own national budgets)

Bosshard was wrong when he claimed there was deceit here.

________________________

This comment was originally posted at Discovering Intellectual Dishonesty – Part 6 on January 31 at 23:34 by an anonymous reader called Bosshard.

Deceit upon deceit?

Dear author, what we find most annoying in the behavior of others are those same behaviors of which we are equally guilty. You appear to dislike: lies, half truths and manipulation.

Regarding water-

You have much to learn.  Boiling water is good for killing bacteria and the like but does nothing to stave off the ill effects of heavy metals like copper, lead and the like. According to the BBC, at least 10% of all Chinese land is contaminated with heavy metals, which are not rendered inert by boiling. Thus, boiling water in China does no good when these elements are present.

When you made your comment, were you engaging in ““willful deception and a refusal to play by the rules?” when you state that boiling Chinese water is an anti-dote?

And an aside, do you personally drink the same water as the folks in Guizhou or Gansu, or do you purchase bottled water, a thing many of them cannot do?

As for your forgone conclusion that the need for water is greater than that of religion, I would disagree. Freedom of religion is paramount to many souls, just ask the Tibetans who will take their own lives in order to achieve such an end. If I were forced to give up my religion for water, I would not do so.

Please do not pretend to know the mind of the masses when yours may not be as open as you may believe.

This site has much information, but the author, like the Jesuits of old appears to have conjured up a China that he wishes us to believe in. The brutal reality of the communist regime  and havoc it brings to its people can best be understood by reading books like Empire of Lies, The Beijing Consensus, Poorly Made in China, The Party, and a host of others.

I will not return to this comment nor website but would like to offer this question:

If you have lived in China, and all of your readers, then you truly know the truth of this place. And if you truly know the truth of this place, then do you think it’s right to knowingly deceive the people about it?

God bless and keep all His children safe and informed.

Continued on February 17 at Contaminated Water and Soil is a Global Problem – Part 5 or return to Part 3

______________

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.

Subscribe to “iLook China”
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.

About iLook China

1 Comment | America, China, environment, India | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Contaminated Water and Soil is a Global Problem – Part 3/6

February 17, 2012

CANADA

The CIA Factbook says the total land area of Canada is 9,903,507 square km and  arable land covers 4.57% of that area with permanent crops on 0.65% of that land or 64,372 square km.

For the ‘Environment – curent issues,’ the CIA says, “air pollution and resulting acid rain severely affecting lakes and damaging forests; metal smelting, coal-burning utilities, and vehicle emissions impacting on agricultural and forest productivity; ocean waters becoming contaminated due to agricultural, industrial, mining, and forestry activities”


Tar Sands Oil Extraction – The Dirty Truth

“Once the bitumen from the Tar Sands has been mined out and Fort McMurray becomes the,” Detroit of the North” The Cree will be left with the effects of polluted rivers, Tailings Ponds, a naked landscape that was once Boreal forest and the steam injection operations that have polluted the groundwater, not to mention the health complications brought by all of this pollution.” Source: The Tar Sands video

In a piece titled. North America Shifts Pollution from Air to Land, the Environmental News Service says, “Factories, electric utilities, hazardous waste management facilities and coal mines in the United States and Canada generated almost 3.4 million metric tonnes of toxic chemical waste in 1999, shows an annual report from the Commission for Environmental Cooperation of North America. The wastes included 269,000 tonnes of chemicals known to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive problems…

“The five year trend shows a slight overall change in the total of toxic chemicals generated, but big changes in how those pollutants are handled. The North American manufacturing sector’s 25 percent (153,000 tonnes) reduction in releases to air was offset by a 25 percent (33,000 tonnes) increase in on site releases to land and a 35 percent (58,000 tonnes) increase in off site releases, mostly to landfills.”

EcoJustice says, “Right now Canada has no national standards for keeping our drinking water safe. Unlike other countries such as the United States and Australia that have adopted legally binding federal standards to protect every citizen’s right to safe drinking water, Canada continues to leave it up to each province and territory to set their own.

“The result? Canadians are subject to a patchwork of standards that range from excellent to abysmal. This means that how safe your water is depends on where you live.”

________________________

This comment was originally posted at Discovering Intellectual Dishonesty – Part 6 on January 31 at 23:34 by an anonymous reader called Bosshard.

Deceit upon deceit?

Dear author, what we find most annoying in the behavior of others are those same behaviors of which we are equally guilty. You appear to dislike: lies, half truths and manipulation.

Regarding water-

You have much to learn.  Boiling water is good for killing bacteria and the like but does nothing to stave off the ill effects of heavy metals like copper, lead and the like. According to the BBC, at least 10% of all Chinese land is contaminated with heavy metals, which are not rendered inert by boiling. Thus, boiling water in China does no good when these elements are present.

When you made your comment, were you engaging in ““willful deception and a refusal to play by the rules?” when you state that boiling Chinese water is an anti-dote?

And an aside, do you personally drink the same water as the folks in Guizhou or Gansu, or do you purchase bottled water, a thing many of them cannot do?

As for your forgone conclusion that the need for water is greater than that of religion, I would disagree. Freedom of religion is paramount to many souls, just ask the Tibetans who will take their own lives in order to achieve such an end. If I were forced to give up my religion for water, I would not do so.

Please do not pretend to know the mind of the masses when yours may not be as open as you may believe.

This site has much information, but the author, like the Jesuits of old appears to have conjured up a China that he wishes us to believe in. The brutal reality of the communist regime  and havoc it brings to its people can best be understood by reading books like Empire of Lies, The Beijing Consensus, Poorly Made in China, The Party, and a host of others.

I will not return to this comment nor website but would like to offer this question:

If you have lived in China, and all of your readers, then you truly know the truth of this place. And if you truly know the truth of this place, then do you think it’s right to knowingly deceive the people about it?

God bless and keep all His children safe and informed.

Continued on February 16 at Contaminated Water and Soil is a Global Problem – Part 4 or return to Part 2

______________

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.

Subscribe to “iLook China”
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.

About iLook China

Leave a Comment » | America, China, environment, India, science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Contaminated Water and Soil is a Global Problem – Part 2/6

February 16, 2012

AMERICA

I’ve known about heavy metals, pesticides, drugs/medicine, chemicals, etc. in America’s water supply for some time, which is why we distill the water we drink at home. However, when I wrote Water, the Democracy versus the Authoritarian Republic, the focus was on which country was doing a better job supplying drinking water to its people—India or China—the topic wasn’t about water contamination, which I knew to be more of a global challenge due to our modern lifestyles.

Before I turn to America’s contaminated soil and fresh water , I want to point out that China’s enemies and/or critics only want to focus on China because their goal is to demonize China and the Chinese and they cannot achieve this when we compare an issue in China such as contaminated soil and fresh water with the same issue in other countries.


Clean Water Act in America

The total land area of America is 9,161,966 square km. and arable land covers 18.01% of that. Irrigated land covers about 230,000 sq km.

The CIA Factbook says of ‘Environment – current issues’ – “air pollution resulting in acid rain in both the US and Canada; the US is the largest single emitter of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels; water pollution from runoff of pesticides and fertilizers; limited natural freshwater resources in much of the western part of the country require careful management; desertification.”

The New York Times reported in 2009, “Agricultural runoff is the single largest source of water pollution in the nation’s rivers and streams, according to the E.P.A. An estimated 19.5 million Americans fall ill each year from waterborne parasites, viruses or bacteria, including those stemming from human and animal waste, according to a study published last year in the scientific journal Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology.”


Supreme Court Restricts Clean Water Act in the United States

Red Orbit.com, which is an education reference site, says, “Today’s soil contamination is a direct result of man-made chemicals or other changes in nature’s soil environment. This contamination most commonly occurs from underground storage tanks bursting, use of pesticides, discarding oil and fuel illegally, leakage of dirty surface water, draining of wastes from landfalls and knowingly dumping industrial wastes into the soil. The most widespread chemicals found are petroleum hydrocarbons, solvents, common pesticides, lead and additional heavy metals. This development of contamination is compared with the quantity of industrializations and the severity of chemical usage… Most of the contaminated land has been identified in North America and Western Europe. A legal foundation has been put in place to recognize and handle this environmental issue in many of their countries.


The Truth about Bottled Water – if you are not watching the videos, you are not getting all the facts.

“The United States may have one of the most massive soil contaminations, but is a leader in outlining and executing standards for cleanup. While other industrialized countries have an abundance of contaminated sites, they do not have the remediation the United States has put into place. Thousands of sites undergo cleanup in the U.S. each year. Cleanup is performed by using microbes, excavation and a more costly extraction or air stripping.”

“The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that there are more than 450,000 polluted sites like these existing in the U.S…  Applications of intensive agricultural techniques, which involve the continuous overuse of fertilizers in any form, have been proven to cause salinity in soil quality due to an imbalance in the soil’s nutrient contents. Accordingly, more than a million hectares (10,000 square miles) of agricultural land have become unfit for the growth and production of agricultural crops.” Source: Bright Bulb.com


Contaminated Drinking Water in California

“In USA, there are 600 000 brown fields which are contaminated with heavy metals and need reclamation (McKeehan, 2000). According to government statistics, coal mine has contaminated more than 19 000 km of US streams and rivers from heavy metals, acid mine drainage and polluted sediments. More than 100 000 ha of cropland, 55 000 ha of pasture and 50 000 ha of forest have been lost (Ragnarsdottir and Hawkins, 2005).” Source: Pub Med Central, Journal of Zhejiang University Science, China, March 2008

You may also want to read up on heavy metal contamination from the U.S. Geological Survey of Contaminants in the Mississippi River.

For a better understanding of what is going on in America, I turn you over to Erin Brockovich for a sampling.

The real Erin Brockovich [Julia Roberts played her in the 2000 movie, Erin Brockovich] has been an American consumer advocate for 19 years and in her own words says, “She is still fighting!”

Brockovich says, “As early as 1965 this company knew that the facility in Hinkley, California was contaminating the ground water with high levels of hexavalent chromium and they chose to cover it up.”

Her current work includes the Gulf Oil Spill. She says, ” I am very concerned about the Oil Dispersant “Corexit” that is being used because some reports are coming in about people getting very sick.”

For the Environment, she says, “There is a new twist in the Cameron, Missouri cancer clusters and activist, Erin Brockovich. Families of cancer patients are now suing a hide tanning plant 37 miles away in St. Joseph.”

You may also want to see “America’s Top 10 Worst Man Made Environmental Disasters” at Earth First.com, or this CBS report on A Toxic Cover Up? by Rebecca Leung at 60 Minutes.

Leung says, “It happened in October of 2000, when 300 million gallons of coal slurry – thick pudding-like waste from mining operations – flooded land, polluted rivers and destroyed property in Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. The slurry contained hazardous chemicals, including arsenic and mercury.”

Then there is what On Earth.org calls The Largest Environmental Disaster in U.S. History, which took place in Tennessee. In addition, there is also Pharmaceuticals in Our Water Supplies – Are ‘Drugged Waters’ a Water Quality Threat?

________________________

This comment was originally posted at Discovering Intellectual Dishonesty – Part 6 on January 31 at 23:34 by an anonymous reader called Bosshard.

Deceit upon deceit?

Dear author, what we find most annoying in the behavior of others are those same behaviors of which we are equally guilty. You appear to dislike: lies, half truths and manipulation.

Regarding water-

You have much to learn.  Boiling water is good for killing bacteria and the like but does nothing to stave off the ill effects of heavy metals like copper, lead and the like. According to the BBC, at least 10% of all Chinese land is contaminated with heavy metals, which are not rendered inert by boiling. Thus, boiling water in China does no good when these elements are present.

When you made your comment, were you engaging in ““willful deception and a refusal to play by the rules?” when you state that boiling Chinese water is an anti-dote?

And an aside, do you personally drink the same water as the folks in Guizhou or Gansu, or do you purchase bottled water, a thing many of them cannot do?

As for your forgone conclusion that the need for water is greater than that of religion, I would disagree. Freedom of religion is paramount to many souls, just ask the Tibetans who will take their own lives in order to achieve such an end. If I were forced to give up my religion for water, I would not do so.

Please do not pretend to know the mind of the masses when yours may not be as open as you may believe.

This site has much information, but the author, like the Jesuits of old appears to have conjured up a China that he wishes us to believe in. The brutal reality of the communist regime  and havoc it brings to its people can best be understood by reading books like Empire of Lies, The Beijing Consensus, Poorly Made in China, The Party, and a host of others.

I will not return to this comment nor website but would like to offer this question:

If you have lived in China, and all of your readers, then you truly know the truth of this place. And if you truly know the truth of this place, then do you think it’s right to knowingly deceive the people about it?

God bless and keep all His children safe and informed.

Continued on February 15 at Contaminated Water and Soil is a Global Problem – Part 3 or return to Part 1

______________

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.

Subscribe to “iLook China”
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.

About iLook China

5 Comments | America, China, environment, India, science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Contaminated Water and Soil is a Global Problem – Part 1/6

February 15, 2012

In “Deceit upon Deceit?” an anonymous reader called Bosshard left a comment to another post, which I decided to delete and republish in this series after I did some research on the subject.

In fact, the entire comment will end each post in this series as a reminder of what Bosshard wrote, because I see his comment as an example of a double standard, which means China is judged in isolation while many other nations with the same problems/challenges [or worse as you will discover] are often ignored.

When I first read the comment and approved it for the other post, I came away feeling as if Bosshard had singled out China as a villain when in fact, heavy metal pollution of soil and water is a global problem and not exclusive to China.

When I said the Chinese could boil water to rid it of pathogens, I had not considered heavy metals, which I know may only be removed with special filters or by distilling the water.

In fact, drinking unsafe water with pathogens may lead to a miserable death much sooner than drinking water contaminated with heavy metals.  Survival Topics.com says, “According to the Wilderness Medical Society, water temperatures above 160° F (70° C) kill all pathogens within 30 minutes and above 185° F (85° C) within a few minutes. So in the time it takes for the water to reach the boiling point (212° F or 100° C) from 160° F (70° C), all pathogens will be killed, even at high altitude.”


safe drinking water is a global problem.

However, when rural Chinese are faced with the choice of drinking water that may be contaminated with both pathogens and heavy metals and all that is available is boiling, what choice do the Chinese have? As a backpacker that has hiked many times in California’s mountains, I have used both a ceramic filter to purify the water and boiled it.

Drinking water contaminated with pathogens may lead to a quick and miserable death much faster than drinking water contaminated with heavy metals.

Anyone interested in the Health Risks of Heavy Metals may want to click on this link and read about it. Then you may want to make sure to buy a filter designed to remove heavy metals from water or buy a countertop distiller.

If you watched the videos with this post and heard the comment that two billion people, about a third of humanity, drinks unsafe water, then Bosshard’s comment was disingenuous since he focused his criticism on China while ignoring the rest of the world.

Nation Master.com published an environmental ranking of freshwater pollution in sixty-nine countries. Number ONE was Israel with the most freshwater pollution at 27.07 tons/cubic km. China was listed as number FOURTEEN (3.78 tons/cubic km)  right behind Japan (4.27 tons/cubic km).

In fact, South Korea was number NINE with 5.68 tons/cubic km. The United States was number THIRTY with 1.14 tons/cubic km.

What does this mean? It means that thirteen countres had worse freshwater pollution than China did.

Maybe Bosshard didn’t know these facts, because he is only interested in what happens in China. I may never know the answer since Bosshard said, “I will not return to this comment nor website” after he dropped his misleading logical fallacy of a bomb in my lap. What he says may be true but how he said it may cause others to blame China for something that is a global problem and not unique to China.

In the rest of this series, there will be posts that focus on soil and water contamination in America, another on Canada, then China, India and last Russia—five of the world’s largest countries measured by land area and/or population.

________________________

This comment was originally posted at Discovering Intellectual Dishonesty – Part 6 on January 31 at 23:34 by an anonymous reader called Bosshard.

Deceit upon deceit?

Dear author, what we find most annoying in the behavior of others are those same behaviors of which we are equally guilty. You appear to dislike: lies, half truths and manipulation.

Regarding water-

You have much to learn.  Boiling water is good for killing bacteria and the like but does nothing to stave off the ill effects of heavy metals like copper, lead and the like. According to the BBC, at least 10% of all Chinese land is contaminated with heavy metals, which are not rendered inert by boiling. Thus, boiling water in China does no good when these elements are present.

When you made your comment, were you engaging in ““willful deception and a refusal to play by the rules?” when you state that boiling Chinese water is an anti-dote?

And an aside, do you personally drink the same water as the folks in Guizhou or Gansu, or do you purchase bottled water, a thing many of them cannot do?

As for your forgone conclusion that the need for water is greater than that of religion, I would disagree. Freedom of religion is paramount to many souls, just ask the Tibetans who will take their own lives in order to achieve such an end. If I were forced to give up my religion for water, I would not do so.

Please do not pretend to know the mind of the masses when yours may not be as open as you may believe.

This site has much information, but the author, like the Jesuits of old appears to have conjured up a China that he wishes us to believe in. The brutal reality of the communist regime  and havoc it brings to its people can best be understood by reading books like Empire of Lies, The Beijing Consensus, Poorly Made in China, The Party, and a host of others.

I will not return to this comment nor website but would like to offer this question:

If you have lived in China, and all of your readers, then you truly know the truth of this place. And if you truly know the truth of this place, then do you think it’s right to knowingly deceive the people about it?

God bless and keep all His children safe and informed.

Continued on February 14 at Contaminated Water and Soil is a Global Problem – Part 2

______________

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.

Subscribe to “iLook China”
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.

About iLook China

3 Comments | America, China, environment, India, science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse