China Coal Industry Poster Boy
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in China, Environment
This is after one day’s work in the mines. The guy is taking a bath to get all the soot off of his body. That’s just insane.
And as Speigel Online reports:
hina’s coal industry is the world’s most dangerous, as measured by the number of miners who are killed per year. In the first 10 months of 2007, there have been 3,069 deaths and on average since 2000, 6,000 miners have died in China every year.
If global warming is real, and I think it is, China is basically doing more to plunge us into a hole we won’t be able to dig out of than any other country on the planet.
Makes me wonder what the Beijing Summer Olympics are going to be like.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 and is filed under China, Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 14th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
That is REALLY insane. Notice in the picture also that he obviously wore no mask or eye protection while working. (The lit cigarette is another subject entirely.) Thus, even if you survive years of working in China’s coal mines, eventually you will die an early death from Black Lung Disease. China’s work safety rules are none of our business. However, allowing them to host the Olympics next year takes that reasoning too far. If course, it is too late to change that decision, isn’t it?
Several weeks ago, Beijing shut down almost all motor traffic in the city for a day. The resulting drop in pollution still left levels obviously dangerous for athletes & spectators both. Considering that the Games will last for weeks & millions more will be in the city for them, how can the government hope to move all of them efficiently from one venue to another, produce the necessary added amount of electricity, & still reduce pollution to reasonably safe levels? Even if they shut down all the industry in the area starting a week early, I doubt they could meet that goal.
Meanwhile, beyond the Olympics: As China, & India, keep adding more dirty coal power plants to their grids, one obvious outcome will be population reduction in their countries because life expectancy will drop like a rock. Of course, over time, the pollution cloud will reach far beyond their borders which will influence populations beyond their borders.
While it is in our interests to convince Asia to clean up their act, such efforts will be worthless until we make real efforts to clean up our own act. Demanding them to do so without creating a good example to follow, first, will only fall on deaf ears. Why should they slow their economy to do this when we thus far have failed to do so ourselves? If we, with the world’s richest economy, “can’t afford it”, how can we expect them to?
After all the experience we have with this mindset, we can’t expect “Do as I say, not as I do” to work. At least in the real world, we can.
November 14th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
OOPS! last sentence:
Not in the real world, we can’t.
my bad . . .