China offers green energy lessons, but will we learn?
May 8, 2011 - 1:31 am
Harry Reid is back from his China trip and all a'twitter over that country's "investments" in clean energy production and high-speed railways.
Reid's 10-senator delegation visited renewable energy facilities in Chengdu and met with officials of the Chinese Rail Ministry to discuss high-speed rail, which is being pushed by President Obama. Sen. Reid backs the high-speed, steel-rail Desert Xpress train from Las Vegas to Victorville, Calif.
Reid said he also met with leaders of A-Power Energy Generation Systems, a Chinese firm that partnered with an American company to announce plans to build a wind turbine manufacturing plant in Southern Nevada. They claim the project would create 1,000 jobs -- if it is ever actually built. (How Nevada's $8.25 per-hour minimum wage, never mind the potential for unionization, will stack up against China's factory labor pay of 64 cents an hour is a glaringly unanswered question.)
"With our vast renewable energy resources and American ingenuity, we can't afford not to be a globally competitive leader in this important area," Reid said. "China isn't investing so heavily in clean energy just because it's good for the environment -- it's doing so because it's good for the economy."
This reminds me of an old joke -- the one about how the Irish actually invented bagpipes as a way to scare wolves from their flocks. As a practical joke, they convinced the Scots it was a musical instrument.
Are Americans the butt of a huge Chinese practical joke?
Yes, China in 2009 alone invested $34 billion in renewable energy production, Bjorn Lomborg wrote in a column that appeared in the Review-Journal this past month, but almost all of their solar panels and wind turbines were sold to gullible Americans and Europeans whose governments subsidize their installation. Lomborg, the author of "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming," wrote that China produced half the world's output of solar panels in 2010 but installed just 1 percent of those in their own country.
I wonder if the senators toured the areas where the Chinese solar panel manufacturers are dumping their toxic waste. Making polysilicon for solar panels leaves the chemical silicon tetrachloride, which when exposed to humid air turns to acid and poisonous hydrogen chloride. According to various news accounts, including The Washington Post, the Chinese firms have been dumping this waste onto the ground, into rivers and storing it in barrels.
While producing all these "renewables," China's production of greenhouse gases increased 175 percent in the past decade. It builds a new coal-fired power plant every week.
The Chinese have erected a large number of windmills, Lomborg notes, but many of those were built merely to satisfy a government quota -- and many have never been connected to the country's power grid.
Perhaps the senators visited the plant in northern China where neodymium is produced for wind turbine magnets and saw the same lake of toxic waste that British reporters described in a January article in the Daily Mail.
As for the vaunted and admired $1 trillion Chinese high-speed railway system, it has run up some $276 billion in debt, and its railway minister, Liu Zhijun, was fired amid an investigation into corruption and shoddy workmanship, according to Investor's Business Daily.
The ministry's Beijing-Tianjin line is said to be losing an Amtrak-like $100 million a year. In April, because of unspecified safety concerns, the top speed of the trains was reduced from 218 mph to a more Europe-like 186 mph.
A blogger at DailyTech quoted a Chinese professor from Beijing as saying, "In China, we will have a debt crisis -- a high-speed rail debt crisis. I think it is more serious than your subprime mortgage crisis. You can always leave a house or use it. The rail system is there. It's a burden. You must operate the rail system, and when you operate it, the cost is very high."
Is that economic development or a practical joke ending on a sour note?
Thomas Mitchell is senior opinion editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.