The blackout that shrouded San Diego in darkness in September demonstrated the problem with relying on power grids as they’re currently designed. The problem began at a substation in Arizona, and a series of triggering events caused failures all the way to San Onofre nuclear plant on the coast. At the cost of an estimated $100 million in damages, and major inconvenience to millions of people, the San Diego region received a crash course about the fragility of depending on a grid that runs mostly on distant sources of energy.

But it didn’t have to turn out this way. Four years ago a San Diego engineer, Bill Powers, published a groundbreaking report, San Diego Smart Energy 2020. The report was all about how to use off-the-shelf technologies in order to build and generate power locally to enhance the existing grid, and provide protection against these sorts of events. The report isn’t a pie-in-the-sky vision of the future. It uses affordable technologies that are available and ready to deploy. It’s a practical guide that includes a 20 percent reduction in energy usage through existing efficiency measures and 2,000 megawatts of local solar projects. To back up the solar, which doesn’t generate at night, Powers’ report proposes 700 new megawatts of small co-generation facilities, similar to what is already in use at Qualcomm, UCSD, SDSU, and Children’s Hospital, which are highly efficient users of natural gas.

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In June, Pacific Environment was lucky to host visiting scholar Chen Yongsong, from the Chinese non-profit organization Yunnan Econetwork. Born in the tropical rainforests at the southern tip of China, Yongsong is a seasoned environmental advocate who has worked as a consultant to the Chinese government on a range of environmental issues. For example, he helped develop and ground truth the first government-led sustainable development plan for Yunnan Province, working with communities on a huge range of pilot projects in forestry, agriculture, and environmental management.

Our San Francisco staff and other colleagues gathered to hear Yongsong’s insights into Chinese environmental politics. From a foreign perspective, the space for environmental advocacy in China can be seen as quite narrow, and it was refreshing to learn from Yongsong that the space for doing effective grassroots environmental work in China is much larger than we may think.

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A western gray whale named Flex has been receiving media attention worldwide for being the first of his kind to be tagged and tracked.  He is a 13 year old western gray whale that was tagged on October 4^th, 2010 by Russian and American scientists off of Sakhalin Island in eastern Russia.

His precedence is not the only thing gaining him fame though; his unpredictable path in the last four months has also been gaining him attention.  Scientists and researchers are baffled by his movements, but then again, they humbly admit they did not really know where western gray whales should be going in the first place. (more…)

In December of 2009, the U.S. Ex Im Bank gave a record $3 Billion dollars in financing to ExxonMobil for a controversial Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project in Papua New Guinea.   NGOs and Civil Society groups in Papua New Guinea and abroad warned Ex Im Bank that this project’s pipeline would slice through tribal lands and stir conflicts among local people.  And, as predicted, that’s exactly what happened.

Early this week, an outbreak of violence was reportedly sparked by the recent death of a child near the project site. Villagers reportedly attacked employees of an international contractor to the gas project which led to the shutdown of work at one of the LNG project sites.  Disputes between local landowners and the $15 billion dollar LNG project are nothing new and have been reported several times since the project was sanctioned in 2009. The project was disrupted even last week when landowners protested that they hadn’t received the benefits they have been promised from this project. In February 2010, four people were reportedly killed when fighting broke out over a land dispute and there have been several other shutdowns of the project due to similar issues with landowners and tribal communities.

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The place where fishermen returned the collected crude oil has a nice name, Golden Bay Bridge. To 35 year old fisherman Cui Zhanyou, it has become a bridge of no return.

On the evening of July 27^th, when Cui was transporting barrels of oil to the collection center, his boat was overturned by rough waves. After days of searching, Cui’s family still could not find a trace of him. (more…)

Photo: Greenpeace

In the very recent memory of Tom Beeke, a passionate Canadian birder, Dalian’s Jinshitan resort was still his land of discovery. Tom got a job as English teacher at Dalian Maple Leaf International School several years ago. Besides living close to the sandy beach, it was also a great treat being able to venture around Jishintan coast, bushes and wetlands to watch birds.  This summer, Tom’s new book, Birds of Dalian, hit the local book market.

Dalian, located on the East Asia-Pacific Flyway of migratory birds, is an important stopover site for birds migrating between Siberia and Australia. For those birds, who are now in Siberia, their journeys south will soon start.  For this year’s new chicks, their first ever encounter with the coasts, islands and the sea around Dalian will begin one month later. (more…)

Zhong Yu of Greenpeace bears witness to the Dalian oil spill (Photo: Greenpeace)

Twenty-two years ago, when my high school classmates unfolded a banner with the words “Save Our Seas!”, we put the Greenpeace logo on the banner.  At that time, we were protesting marine debris littering the coasts of Dalian.

Now, twenty-two years since that unofficial Greenpeace banner hung in 1988, Dalian received its first official support from Greenpeace with the deployment of several Greenpeace teams to respond to the massive oil spill in Dalian.

Zhong Yu, senior action coordinator with Greenpeace China, was not prepared for what she saw nor for what she would encounter.  Like many clean up workers and local fishermen, Zhong did not wear protective gear when she walked into thick crude oil along the beach. The photo of her wearing a red Greenpeace T-shirt and blue jeans was the first telling image from Greenpeace bearing witness to the Dalian disaster. (more…)

Firefighters responding to the scene of the Oil spill in Dalian, China (Photo from Netease)

To Chinese firefighter Jiang Hui, his Darley fire truck was his darling. Jiang had been a driver with a $1 million fire truck since his unit purchased it three years ago, and he liked this American brand.

Jiang was among the earliest squads to reach the burning and smoky scene in Dalian. While shooting water and foam to the fire, the blazing crude oil quickly rushed near their feet. The tires of the fire truck caught fire.  Jiang jumped into the truck and tried to move it, but the flame started to engulf the fire truck.  Another firefighter ran to the truck’s front side, pulled Jiang out of the cabin and dragged him away.

The heat was too hot to bear. While some firefighters shot water canons towards the burning oil tanker, others had to shoot water towards the front line of firefighters to cool them down.

“Water, Water!”, “Foam!” were the shouts of the firefighters mixed with the sounds of continuous explosions and blazing noise of fireballs.

A Dalian TV cameraman, Lu Jianwei, captured a short conversation of a firefighter, later identified as Xu Zhiyou, talking to his wife over the cell phone. “Dear, I might not be back, treat mom well, treat our child well!”  On the other side of the line, his wife must have asked why. “Don’t ask, no time, I will stop here.” Then he turned off the phone and rushed towards the fire. (more…)

Site of explosion - Dalian New Port

When firefighter Sang Wu got the assignment from his director, Sang could see the tears welling in the director’s eyes. His assignment was to turn off the valves of the oil tanks, each containing 100,000 cube meters of crude oil, which were fueling the flaming pipelines.  This was the scene on the night of July 16^th, 2010, in Dalian New Port where the oil pipeline exploded. Sang Wu and his two other fellow fire fighters might have just accepted a suicide mission.

Because of the explosion and the fire, the electricity to the port was cut off. Turning off the valve was a tiresome endeavor. What would normally take just a few seconds, would take Sang and his teammates 80,000 turns manually. After turning the wheels 320,000 rounds in total, Sang and his teammates sealed off the valves of four of the closest oil tanks after eight hours of labor.

Throughout the night of July 16^th, over 2,000 firefighters from 14 major cities of Liaoning province raced to the scene of explosion. The site is a base for storage of crude oil and chemicals. Fifty-one toxic chemical tankers were linked up in the area near the explosion.  The closest tanker was less than 100 meters away from the burning old tanker.  If it had not been for the courageous actions of the firefighters, the tankers could have exploded and the city of Dalian may have simply turned into another Bhopal.