Pollution

Here are a few interesting news items I read lately:

China: Yangtze is Irreversibly Polluted (April 13, 2007, AFP)

China's massive Yangtze river, a lifeline for tens of millions of people, is seriously polluted and the damage is almost irreversible, a state-run newspaper said Monday. More than 370 miles of the river are in critical condition and almost 30 percent of its major tributaries are seriously polluted, the China Daily said, citing a report by the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The pollution, along with damming and heavy use of boats, has caused a sharp decline in aquatic life along the Yangtze. The report said the annual harvest of aquatic products from the river has dropped from 427,000 tons in the 1950s to about 100,000 tons in the 1990s. It also showed that the huge reservoir created by the Three Gorges Dam, the world's biggest hydropower project, was seriously polluted by pesticides, fertilizers and sewage from passenger boats.

China About to Become Biggest CO-2 Emitter: IEA (April 18, 2007, Reuters)

China will overtake the United States as the world's biggest emitter of heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) either this year or next, the International Energy Agency said on Wednesday. The estimate is much firmer than the IEA's previous forecast, last November, that on current trends China would overtake the United States before 2010. China is set to become the world's top carbon emitter just as serious talks start to extend the U.N.-sponsored Kyoto Protocol on global warming beyond 2012, potentially heaping pressure on Beijing to take more action on climate change. A copy of a so-far unpublished Chinese government global warming report, seen by Reuters, rejects binding caps on carbon emissions until the country's modernization, by the middle of this century, opting instead to brake emissions growth.

The students are aware of these issues. In class this week we discussed global problems. I asked the students to brainstorm amongst themselves and then write their answers on the board. Most of the words written revolved around these two topics.