Green China

“I am interested in heat generation, this place is about cement—no match!” he told me (through an interpreter) at the factory in Zibo. He spent nearly the next 20 years of his career in a long effort to make the dirty, wasteful, fast-growing cement industry less environmentally destructive. The heart of his idea—easy to describe, tricky to implement—is capturing the enormous amount of heat normally wasted in cement making and using it to run turbines that generate electric power. This power can then be fed back into the factory, doing work that would otherwise require burning even more coal. The reduction of dust is a visible indicator of the more fundamental reduction of waste. Over the course of a long day, I heard about the many, many refinements Tang had made to this “co-generation” system since he first started working on it, in the mid-1980s. The punch line is that it now works well enough to cut the energy (mainly from coal) required to make clinker by 60 percent, and the overall power demands of the cement production line by 30 percent.

Beneath his shiny bald head and worried brow, Wu's eyes are dancing. The bullish environmentalist, a former People's Liberation Army officer, has fought to save China's forests and streams for more than 20 years.

Not only do the hairy plants capture carbon, they "collect dust and dirt out of the air and make the rain fall more gently on the ground," says Gib Cooper, a nurseryman in Gold Beach, Ore., and executive director of Bamboo of the Americas, a conservation-action organization. "I hate to say it: The world's population and economy are going to outpace whatever we try to do. But bamboo will help."

Heard of the United Nations program to plant a billion trees for the planet? Bamboo sequesters carbon dioxide at far higher rates than an equivalent stand of trees and releases up to three times the amount of oxygen.

China and the Internet:History, Economy and Human RightsBy Wolfgang Kleinwächter April 2008

ember 2007, ther

China and the Internet:History, Economy and Human RightsBy Wolfgang Kleinwächter April 2008