Source: NYT (7/5/25)
China Has Paid a High Price for Its Dominance in Rare Earths
Dust and groundwater contaminated with heavy metals and radioactive chemicals pose a health threat that the authorities have been trying to address for years.
By Keith Bradsher, who has covered the rare earths industry in China since 2009, reported from Baotou and Longnan in China.

An artificial lake of sludge, partly covered with water, was created in Baotou, China, from the waste from rare earth and iron ore processing. It was built without a liner to prevent its contents from seeping into groundwater. Credit…The New York Times

Chinese mines and refineries produce most of the world’s rare earth metals and practically all of a few crucial kinds of rare earths. This has given China’s government near complete control over a critical choke point in global trade.

But for decades in northern China, toxic sludge from rare earth processing has been dumped into a four-square-mile artificial lake. In south-central China, rare earth mines have poisoned dozens of once-green valleys and left hillsides stripped to barren red clay.

Achieving dominance in rare earths came with a heavy cost for China, which largely tolerated severe environmental damage for many years. The industrialized world, by contrast, had tighter regulations and stopped accepting even limited environmental harm from the industry as far back as the 1990s, when rare earth mines and processing centers closed elsewhere.

In China, the worst damage occurred in and around Baotou, a flat, industrial city of two million people in China’s Inner Mongolia, on the southern edge of the Gobi Desert. Baotou calls itself the world capital of the rare earth industry, but the city and its people bear the scars from decades of poorly regulated rare earths production.

An artificial lake of sludge known as the Weikuang Dam, four square miles in size, holds the waste left over after metals are extracted from mined ore. During the winter and spring, the sludge dries out. The dust that then blows off the lake is contaminated with lead, cadmium and other heavy metals, including traces of radioactive thorium, according to technical papers by Chinese scholars. Continue reading China has paid a high price for dominance in rare earths →

Source: The Guardian (3/14/25)
‘All the birds returned’: How a Chinese project led the way in water and soil conservation
The Loess plateau was the most eroded place on Earth until China took action and reversed decades of damage from grazing and farming
By Helen Davidson

It was one of China’s most ambitious environmental endeavours ever.

The Loess plateau, an area spanning more than 245,000 sq miles (640,000 sq km) across three provinces and parts of four others, supports about 100 million people. By the end of the 20th century, however, this land, once fertile and productive, was considered the most eroded place on Earth, according to a documentary by the ecologist John D Liu.

Generations of farmers had cleared and cultivated the land, slowly breaking down the soil and destroying the cover. Every year, the dust from the plain jammed the Yellow River with silt (this is how the river gets its name), sending plumes of loess, a fine wind-blown sediment, across Chinese cities – including to the capital, Beijing.

And so in 1999 the Chinese government took drastic emergency action with the launch of Grain to Green, a pilot project backed by World Bank funding, to regreen the plateau and reverse the damage done by overgrazing and overcultivation of the once forested hillsides that would become what the bank described in 2004 as “the largest and most successful water and soil conservancy project in the world” (pdf). Continue reading Loess plateau water and soil conservation project →

Source: NYT (4/19/24)
Opinion: Xi Thinks China Can Slow Climate Change. What if He’s Right?
By Jacob Dreyer

Credit…Minh Hoang/EPA, via Shutterstock

At first glance, Xi Jinping seems to have lost the plot.

China’s president appears to be smothering the entrepreneurial dynamism that allowed his country to crawl out of poverty and become the factory of the world. He has brushed aside Deng Xiaoping’s maxim “To get rich is glorious” in favor of centralized planning and Communist-sounding slogans like “ecological civilization” and “new, quality productive forces,” which have prompted predictions of the end of China’s economic miracle.

But Mr. Xi is, in fact, making a decades-long bet that China can dominate the global transition to green energy, with his one-party state acting as the driving force in a way that free markets cannot or will not. His ultimate goal is not just to address one of humanity’s most urgent problems — climate change — but also to position China as the global savior in the process.

It has already begun. In recent years, the transition away from fossil fuels has become Mr. Xi’s mantra and the common thread in China’s industrial policies. It’s yielding results: China is now the world’s leading manufacturer of climate-friendly technologies, such as solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles. Last year the energy transition was China’s single biggest driver of overall investment and economic growth, making it the first large economy to achieve that. Continue reading Xi thinks China can slow climate change →

Source: NYT (3/7/24)
How China Came to Dominate the World in Solar Energy
Beijing is set to further increase its manufacturing and installation of solar panels as it seeks to master global markets and wean itself from imports.
By Keith Bradsher (reporting from Beijing)

A solar farm owned by the Huaneng Group in Shilin, China. Credit…Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

China unleashed the full might of its solar energy industry last year. It installed more solar panels than the United States has in its history. It cut the wholesale price of panels it sells by nearly half. And its exports of fully assembled solar panels climbed 38 percent while its exports of key components almost doubled.

Get ready for an even bigger display of China’s solar energy dominance.

While the United States and Europe are trying to revive renewable energy production and help companies fend off bankruptcy, China is racing far ahead.

At the annual session of China’s legislature this week, Premier Li Qiang, the country’s second-highest official after Xi Jinping, announced that the country would accelerate the construction of solar panel farms as well as wind and hydroelectric projects.

With China’s economy stumbling, the ramped-up spending on renewable energy, mainly solar, is a cornerstone of a big bet on emerging technologies. China’s leaders say that a “new trio” of industries — solar panels, electric cars and lithium batteries — has replaced an “old trio” of clothing, furniture and appliances.

The goal is to help offset a steep slump in China’s housing construction sector. China hopes to harness emerging industries like solar power, which Mr. Xi likes to describe as “new productive forces,” to re-energize an economy that has slowed for more than a decade. Continue reading How China came to dominate solar →

Source: The China Project (10/20/23)
How China is attempting to change nature conservation
China is undergoing a great experiment — tightly controlled and driven by big data — that it hopes will offer an alternative way of protecting the planet. For all our sakes, let’s hope it works.
By Kyle Obermann

Beijing, as a critical bird habitat along one of the world’s most important migrating bird corridors, has included 26% of its land and water inside ERLs, including bodies of water like lakes of the Summer Palace. Photo by Kyle Obermann.

I was surprised to encounter the White House amid Sichuan’s Qionglai Mountains, decrepit, looking like a scene out of a post-apocalyptic movie. Surprised, partly because I had not been in China long, and didn’t yet know about the replica White Houses, Eiffel Towers, and Jackson Holes in random valley towns. But mostly surprised because I was traveling through a nature reserve.

Continue reading How China is attempting to change nature conservation →