With multiplying impacts of climate change - increasing floods, cyclones, and drought - thousands of climate refugees are migrating to Dhaka. And the city, well beyond its carrying capacity, is bursting at the seams.
The word most often associated with Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is perhaps, "overpopulated." Supporting more than 14 million people on less than 325 square kilometers (125 square miles) of land, the city's drainage, waste management and transportation infrastructure is on the brink of collapse.
Residents of north-eastern China donned gas masks and locked themselves indoors on Sunday after their homes were enveloped by some of the worst levels of smog on record.
On June 21, 2004, Charoen Wat-aksorn, a 37-year-old pineapple farmer from Bo Nok village in Prachuap Khiri Khan province, some 240 km [150 miles] south of Bangkok, was returning by bus to his hometown. He had just been in the capital to testify before a parliamentary anti-corruption panel as to how local politicians were colluding with business figures to conduct illegal land grabs.
With the restart of the war in North-Kurdistan by Turkish state in end of July 2015 the Turkish Army has started to burn down forests. After 2,5 years of negotiations about the start of a peace process between the Turkish government and the Kurdish Freedom Movement, the Turkish side decided to attack the PKK Guerrilla HPG (Peoples Defense Forces) and legal political activists.
BEIJING — Outdoor air pollution contributes to the deaths of an estimated 1.6 million people in China every year, or about 4,400 people a day, according to a newly released scientific paper.
Coal-fired capacity expansion in China is largely driven by an outdated market design that ‘guarantees’ each power plant a certain amount of operating hours. The system creates false investment security in an overcapacity situation, and has led to the absurd outcome that grid operators are failing to feed in electricity from wind and solar power plants to the grid in order to give coal-fired power plants their promised operating hours and revenue.
Renewable energy is now being seen by many people around the world as a cost-effective development solution both for developed and developing nations. Countries have slowly been realising that the use of coal and the huge amount of carbon emissions it generates harms the environment and impacts our daily activities.
In fact, according to Christine Lins, Executive Secretary of the Renewable Energy Network for the 21st Century, “last year, for the first time in 40 years, economic and emissions growth have decoupled”.
Shanghai – Anti Pollution protests against the construction of a new PX plant continue to grow in the Shanghai suburb of Jinshui. The protest that began on Monday doubled in size Thursday night when approximately 5000 people filled the streets to re-affirm their opposition.
Along with the massive night time march, large groups of people have maintained a protest outside of the Jinshui District Government building since Monday.
California is in the midst of one of the worst droughts in the state’s history, prompting Governor Jerry Brown to declare a water “state of emergency.”
Ordinary Californians are bearing the brunt of this disaster. While the governor has imposed restrictions to reduce residential water consumption, businesses in the fields of agriculture and hydraulic fracturing have been largely exempt. Brown’s unwillingness to take on these gargantuan corporate water-wasters lends a sharp political element to an otherwise natural disaster.
This article seeks to explain why China's environmental crisis is so horrific, so much worse than "normal" capitalism most everywhere else, and why the government is incapable of suppressing pollution even from its own industries. I begin with an overview of the current state of China's environment: its polluted air, waters, farmland and the proximate causes, including overproduction, overdevelopment, profligate resource consumption, uncontrolled dumping and venting of pollutants.
