Posted on 05/30/2006 7:08:51 PM PDT by SonnyBubba
China's longest river "cancerous" with pollution.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
BEIJING (Reuters) - China's longest river is "cancerous" with pollution and rapidly dying, threatening drinking water supplies in 186 cities along its banks, state media said on Tuesday.
Chinese environmental experts fear worsening pollution could kill the Yangtze river within five years, Xinhua news agency said, calling for an urgent clean-up.
"Many officials think the pollution is nothing for the Yangtze," Xinhua quoted Yuan Aiguo, a professor with the China University of Geosciences, as saying.
"But the pollution is actually very serious," it added, warning that experts considered it 'cancerous'."
Industrial waste and sewage, agricultural pollution and shipping discharges were to blame for the river's declining health, experts said.
The river, the third longest in the world after the Nile and the Amazon, runs from remote far west Qinghai and Tibet through 186 cities including Chongqing, Wuhan and Nanjing and empties into the sea at Shanghai.
It absorbs more than 40 percent of the country's waste water, 80 percent is untreated, said Lu Jianjian, from East China Normal University.
"As the river is the only source of drinking water in Shanghai, it has been a great challenge for Shanghai to get clean water," Xinhua quoted him as saying.
China is facing a severe water crisis -- 300 million people do not have access to drinkable water -- and the government has been spending heavily to clean major waterways like the Yellow, Huaihe and Yangtze rivers.
But those clean-up campaigns have made limited progress because of spotty regional enforcement. Toxic spills are common, the worst recently being in the Songhua river in the northeast which led to the taps of Harbin being turned off for days.
Despite immediate concerns for the cities along its banks, the Yangtze, along with the Yellow river, is earmarked for China's ambitious South-North water diversion scheme -- a plan to pump water from southern waterways to the parched north.
But environmentalists fear that unless local governments and industries start getting serious about cutting pollution, most of the water shipped north will not be fit to drink.
Most of the Yellow River, the second-longest in China and the cradle of early Chinese civilization, is so polluted it is not safe for drinking or swimming, Xinhua news agency said in May last year.
..a Kyoto exemp...tee
Doogle
This proves that the Chinese government can be even more short-sighted and unjudicious than the American government can be.
China is killing itself.
Please provide us with a working link (URL) to this story.
Proves that Communism and massive industrial pollution generally go hand-in-hand...
'cradle of early Chinese civilization'
They decayed then, they will decay now.
Quick! Somebody call Algore!
You are allowing yourself to be influenced by logic, and, therefore, are vulnerable to great disappointment.
By the time this story has been run through the liberal alternate-reality filter, it will be obvious that China, although it is a communist country (and therefore far more conscious of the importance of protecting the environment), is being forced to destroy its own environmental health due to unfair competition from capitalist countries, led by that awful United States of America.
Meanwhile, Al "Mr. Environment" Gore is in Europe bashing, you guessed it, the USA, over "climate change", a phenomenon of nature which has been occurring since the Earth first cooled.
Clearly that is not true.
It will only effect .00001% of the poplulation....so who cares?
Works for me. Thanks.
After a reasonable time without a working link after a request, we usually punt the article to chat or blog.
I added it to the top. Thanks again.
Why in the world would you capitalize algore?
*****Meanwhile, Al "Mr. Environment" Gore is in Europe bashing, you guessed it, the USA, over "climate change", a phenomenon of nature which has been occurring since the Earth first cooled.*****
You know, I would like to ask Mr. Gore who was to blame for the last ice age, or the melting of the last ice age, or the one that killed out the dinosaurs. Since the Earth *obviously* doesnt go through climatic cycles, what brought those changes about? Is there evidence of prehistoric Republicans destroying the earth tens of thousands, or millions, of year ago? =P
That would make for a good political cartoon! Sometimes I wish I could draw...
My husband and I took a cruise down the Yangtze in 2001 and it was a filthy mess. The waters were creamy yellow with black oil streaks and we saw tires and dead pigs floating by in the 3 days we spent on the river. The impression made on us by our visit to China was that if anyone wants to point a finger about global warming, it needs to be directed at nations like China. We never saw the sun because of the haze, I couldn't bear being in Xian because the fumes made me seriously nauseous and I spent a lot of time in a shopping mall, hotel, or museum just to have filtered air, and raw sewage was carried away in the uncovered gutters next to the sidewalks and straight into the river. Kyoto my ass.
What it proves is that unbridled development and capitalism can have damaging environmental effects that require governmental regulation.
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