https://www.noemamag.com/chinas-revolution-turns-green/
"FUXIN, China — The coal mine outside this city in China’s decaying industrial
northlands closed in 2005, but local authorities have since turned it into an
ecological park, planting grass and putting in a running path. As I walked
through the sunny autumn forest next to the pit recently, I found a museum of
rare rocks and local handicrafts. The plaza outside held a few rusted-out tanks
and train cabooses, impromptu monuments to the life that was. Every once in a
while, the mine’s crater still exhales puffs of smoke from burning coal veins
underground, spewing sulfur and methane into the air, but the overall
atmosphere is not unpleasant.
The main drag downtown feels like a Chinese version of Homer Simpson’s
Springfield, with huge power plants lying inactive and boarded-up apartment
blocks. Friendly provincial youths were sprawled out with watermelon, liquor
and barbecue on a Saturday night. In a local cafe, I met an Englishman who runs
a local preschool; everybody in Fuxin wants to go to there, he told me, because
they want to find a way out. In my hotel, I passed suites with doors propped
open, with men in black t-shirts gazing intently at laptop screens inside.
Fuxin is the kind of town you’d rather reminisce about than live in. The artist
Sun Xun grew up here, and he told me that in high school, studying for the
Gaokao exam, he’d memorize T’ang Dynasty poems about verdant green mountains
while standing on frozen piles of coal. He remembers feeling that the stories
in the texts were fundamentally disconnected from the China he lived in.
But with the wistfulness that long afternoons in a dead-end town
provide, Marxist theorists at the Liaoning University of Engineering and
Technology dream that as an old industrial base, Fuxin has “advantages [that]
can be used to develop wind turbines and units for wind power generation,
improve the technology and quality of equipment, and quickly localize.” Leaders
have ambitions to transform this lost socialist backwater into a green paradise
churning out renewable energy; wind power projects with a generation capacity
of 6.8 gigawatts are under development.
Real estate here is practically worthless; you can buy a place for a few
thousand dollars. Vast investment in wind energy seems to be the only way out
for a dying coal town, a project for Fuxin’s aging population to fill up the
hours with. In a generation, there probably won’t be many people left here,
which is fine, because unlike coal mines, wind turbines don’t require armies of
workers."
Via
Future Crunch issue 190:
https://futurecrunch.com/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
