A week and a half ago I sat in on the first Carbon Management Caucus meeting of the 81st Legislature and listened to a professor from Penn State tell legislators, their staffers, and a few intrepid members of the general public that “we need coal, coal isn’t going anywhere, in China they’re using tons and tons of coal and opening a new plant every week, why should we drop coal if China isn’t, coal coal coal” … you get the picture. I paraphrase, of course. But essentially, a new twist on the China cop-out.
Yes, China uses lots of coal. LOTS. And China’s strategic decision to go crazy on coal plants has done much for rural electrification and providing electricity to populations that have never had it before. But China’s commitment to coal is also slowly killing its people, and they’re aware of it.
Every 30 seconds a baby is born with physical defects in China, partly due to the country’s deteriorating environment, state media said, citing a senior family planning official.
The figure, reported by the China Daily in its weekend edition, adds up to almost 1.1 million in a year, or about seven percent of all births in the world’s most populous nation.
Let me add emphasis to the fact that this information was coming from China’s state media (let me repeat, China’s STATE MEDIA, as in, the official government-sanctioned voice approved by the ruling commmunist party). I find this particularly shocking because it is very likely that, from such a highly regulated source, even this jaw-dropping figure is under-reported.
The article continues,
North China’s coal-rich Shanxi province, a major source of toxic emissions from large-scale chemical industries, has recorded the highest rate of birth defects, the China Daily said in its weekend edition.
“The problem of birth defects is related to environmental pollution, especially in eight main coal zones,” said An Huanxiao, the director of Shanxi provincial family planning agency, according to the paper.
Pan Jianping, a professor of the Women and Child Health Research Office under Xi’an Jiaotong University, warned that the increasing rate of birth defects among Chinese infants would soon become a social problem.
So there you go. Let’s quit coal — do it for the babies.
Austin has long been a hub of the semiconductor industry because a generation ago, state legislators passed a package of incentives to lure silicon chip manufacturers to Texas. This created a high tech boom that has enriched Texans for over 20 years. But now thousands of those jobs are disappearing. The technologies involved to manufacture semiconductor chips and solar installations are very close, and business leaders believe that the semiconductor industry can actually be repurposed to produce solar. At the very least, the skill sets involved in one translate seamlessly into the other, so that individuals who lost semiconductor jobs are the perfect candidates for new solar jobs.
