Because the only solution to
Global WarmingJan. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Half a foot (15 centimeters) of snow may fall over the New York region starting today, the second winter storm in two weeks in an area recovering from a post- Christmas blizzard.
is quick and
decisive action.
Jan. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Rare earth metals are key to global efforts to switch to cleaner energy -- from batteries in hybrid cars to magnets in wind turbines. Mining and processing the metals causes environmental damage that China, the biggest producer, is no longer willing to bear.
China’s rare earth industry each year produces more than five times the amount of waste gas, including deadly fluorine and sulfur dioxide, than the total flared annually by all miners and oil refiners in the U.S. Alongside that 13 billion cubic meters of gas is 25 million tons of wastewater laced with cancer-causing heavy metals such as cadmium, Xu Xu, chairman of the China Chamber of Commerce of Metals, Minerals & Chemicals Importers & Exporters, said at a Beijing conference on Dec. 28.
You should immediately drive your Prius over to the local coop to buy compact flourescent bulbs. It's your duty to the planet.
In that Bloomberg article, the self-pitying air of the Chinese spokesman makes me either want to laugh uproariously or punch him:
ReplyDelete“China supplied the world with very cheap and good-quality rare earths for more than a decade at the cost of depleting its resources and damaging its environment,” Wang Caifeng, who heads the government-affiliated China Association for Rare Earths, said at the conference. “The world should thank China.”
So, they undercut everybody else's rare earth mines by using cheap, ignorant labor so that they could ignore even basic safety precautions; made it impossible for anybody even halfway responsible to stay in the business through their recklessness; and now that their chickens are coming home to roost, we are supposed to pity and be grateful to them?
Ha. They can go soak their heads.
I thought the same thing. They wrecked their environment to make a buck (yuan), not as an act of altruism. Meanwhile, Prius buyers made their purchases as an act of smugness, not as a real act of environmentalism.
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