Also, this, Using Nature and Waste for Walls and Ceilings, about China’s sustainability efforts. A Finnish group has manufactured the shingles made of a composite blend of wood fibers and plastic for new pavilions in Shanghai for this event. The NYT says that themes of this event are recycling plastics using fiberglass to build houses! There are environmental themes considered in the building of many of the spaces for the Shanghai World Expo! ta da!
hi! This story is following a really similar pattern as the Games in Beijing, and it’s such a nice coincidence that both stories happen in CHINA.
Yesterday, Expo Offers Shanghai a Turn in the Spotlight, introduced the parallels that exist between Beijing’s “coming out party” and Shanghai’s Expo event. China spend 45 Billion–even more than in Beijing–to prepare for this international event. Says the times article, “The $61 million United States pavilion is planning to show a Hollywood-produced film about the environment. The French pavilion is displaying seven “national treasures,” including works by Manet and Van Gogh.” I wondered if we’d see more about the environment.
Then, today, Andrew sent me, “Shanghai Puts on a Green Face” also in the NYT. A theme of this event is also “greening”, but today’s article points out the apparent contradiction here, because all of these buildings will be torn down after the event. “Many of these structures have been designed with state-of-the-art energy and water saving features. Expo organizers are especially proud of the ZED Pavilion, which they hail as China’s first “zero carbon emissions” building.
“An in-depth 2009 environmental assessment of the Expo by the United Nations Environment Program was largely positive about the progress made ahead of the Expo opening, including “the success of Shanghai in decoupling growth with worsening pollution.” Despite a population of 19 million and a tripling of economic output between 2000 and 2008, “Shanghai’s rapid development in the last decade did not make air pollution worse. On the contrary, for the first time in the city’s history, economic development was made possible with the ambient concentration of air pollutants reduced or at least stabilized,” the UNEP assessment found.”
Some good news, but we’ll see what happens!
Andrew sent me this China Is Leading the Race to Make Clean Energy today and it is more positive–and true!–and it’s from the New York Times! If you read it with a careful comb though, it’s easy to find our famililar NYT anti-Sino bias.
By 2012, China is expected to surpass the U.S. in terms of total power generation, “Yet renewable energy may be doing more for China’s economy than for the environment. Total power generation in China is on track to pass the United States in 2012 — and most of the added capacity will still be from coal.”
This is assuming that China veers from the the path that it is currently on in terms of integrating clean energy into the grid, and that INDIVIDUALS in China don’t make further demands. When these Chinese individuals are educated about their environment, and are given the outlet for voicing thier concerns, the rate of “greening” will quicken. It’s not fair to assume that all these factors in China will stay the same: if all these factors were the same as 10 years ago, we would’t even be seeing this article in the New York Times.
This article is a few days old, but still super important, of course. On Climate Change Efforts, China Is Key is a GREAT article that Andrew sent to me the other day. The author, EDWARD L. GLAESER, is an economics professor at Harvard, and I’m going to invite him to my screening at Harvard in a few weeks!
Obama was in Asia this past weekend, and so China is back in the news a bit. In Obama Interview, Signs of China’s Heavy Hand starts to tell a little bit about the framework in which the media and Chinese people interact, and although it’s not too directly stated, it’s starting to get closer to the truth and I can read meaning into it that isn’t neccessarily there, of course.
From the article, “Mr. Anti said that Southern Weekly seemed to have forfeited the chance for a less sanitized encounter. In the first three questions, Mr. Obama was asked how he felt about his first visit to China, whether he still had time to play basketball and how he saw China-United States cooperation in the region. “They just talked about nothing,” Mr. Anti said. “Just empty talk.””
This “empty talk” is what friendships are based on, no? You don’t make friends by asking about someone’s grades in schools. You start out by talking about sports, for instance. Obama is making friends.
Have you ever heard of something more exciting? My friend Andrew sent a great NYT article this morning,
Chinese and U.S. Partners to Build Big West-Texas Wind Farm, about a joint venture between China’s Shenyang Power Group and the U.S. Renewable Energy Group to develop wind power in Texas, but the exciting thing about this 1.5 billion dollar project is that the manufacturing and funding is coming from China.
Further, says the NYT, “The project would mark the first instance of a Chinese manufacturer exporting wind turbines to the United States market, according to the vice mayor of the city of Shenyang, Yang Yazhou, who spoke at a news conference announcing the joint venture.”
Construction begins on this project next March 2010.
something is happening now though!
What a hopeful, positive headline from the NYTimes today. I learned today, in Water Needs in China Create Opportunity, that water shortages in Northern China are driving innovation and that Beijing plans to reuse 100 percent of its wastewater by 2013!
I’m not really comfortable writing about The Truth, because it makes me feel self-conscious about being A Filmmaker, but my friend Andrew presented an interesting idea to me that I hadn’t considered previously (!).
China, Hush: Stories of China is a web site that Aviva sent to me and it is a bit off-putting to me because it’s so direct. Maybe the Green Reason is similarly direct, but in a very different direction. The photographer has an agenda and it’s very clear. Thank you for helping me to understand this, Andrew. Andrew pointed out to me that what is interesting about these photographs is the part that is not the subject of these photographs, but the background. The illustrative example which he gave me is to notice, for instance, the labels on the trash in the river, to tell a certain story about what is real and true about this environment. The photographer didn’t choose the labels on the trash containers, so his agenda is not a factor in this element, so it is more true. The picture of sewage on the Yellow River, for example, is blatant but also taken completely out of context. We don’t know anything about the environment in which this picture takes place. To see this photograph without knowing anything about the framework makes it less true–or, rather, we just know a lot less about it–because it is then left up to the viewer to fabricate the context, and the viewer has a bias: why is he looking at a web site titled “Amazing Pictures, Pollution in China” as opposed to one titled “Amazing Pictures, EE in China” or, “Amazing Pictures, Pollution on the Hudson River”?
My friend Larry–also our Olympic historian in the GR–sent me this article, Beijing’s Air is Cleaner, but Far from Clean from the NYT yesterday and we also talk in the Green Reason with Zhu Tong (mentioned on page one of this NYT article!), an atmospheric scientist at Beijing Daxue. I’m so happy to be confirmed by NPR, yesterday, and the NYT now in this very understated way. But I recognized it first!
