Articles by Robert Delfs

Too little, too late?

China will award a contract to build two nuclear reactors in its southeast to France's Areva SA, a Chinese official said according to reports in China Daily and other publications.

The deal, covering two reactors for Yangjiang in Guangdong Province, had originally been awarded to Toshiba Corp.'s Westinghouse Electric Co., which will get an agreement for two other reactors in Shandong Province. The sources said that China needs to add two reactors a year to meet a 2020 target of increasing the share of nuclear in total power from 2.3 percent to 4 percent. Areva and Westinghouse are competing to build as many as 26 more reactors by 2020 as China turns to atomic energy to cut pollution and carbon emissions and reduce its reliance on oil.

Featuring the singer from Midnight Oil!

The Australian opposition Labor Party has selected a new, green leadership team to challenge the long-serving conservative Prime Minister John Howard in national parliamentary elections at the end of 2007. Kevin Rudd, a Chinese-speaking former diplomat, and his deputy, Julia Gillard, decisively defeated incumbent leaders Kim Beazley and Jenny Macklin.

But much of the attention is focused on Rudd's Sunday appointment of Peter Garrett, a Greenpeace board member and former lead singer of the Australian rock band Midnight Oil, to take charge of crafting Labor's new policies on climate change.

"Climate change represents one of the most significant and important issues that Australians must confront now and into the future," Garrett said. "I want to work for leader Rudd to make sure that we roll up our sleeves and do the very best that we can, and I want to put the Howard Government on notice that it's fiddling while Australia burns."

Nice work, PETA

I differ strongly with those who argue that environmentalism should embrace the animal rights agenda, but extensive discussions here suggest that this story may be of more than passing interest. This account of how the AR program to stop animal testing may have gone badly awry may also help explain some of the reasons why environmentalism should try to maintain a respectful distance from other causes, however virtuous or pressing they may seem.

"Few rules and fewer protesters draw animal testing to China," by Jehangir S. Pocha (originally in the Boston Globe), discusses Bridge Pharmaceuticals, a San Francisco-based company that is outsourcing animal testing to China, where -- as a recent article in Forbes (also written by Pocha) described it -- "scientists are cheap, lap animals are plentiful and animal-rights protestors are kept at bay, muzzled by an authoritarian state."

Bridge CEO Glenn Rice said the company's Beijing facilities were designed to meet U.S. standards on animal care, and it anticipates receiving USDA certification by year-end. He was clear, moreover, about the main reason why moving testing to China makes economic sense:

A nice New Yorker piece

Catching up on a month's backlog of reading, I came across an excellent piece on water shortages by Michael Specter, a former colleague of mine who writes on science and public health issues. It's called "The Last Drop: Confronting the possibility of a global catastrophe," in the 23 October issue of the New Yorker.

Specter opens the article by introducing us to Shoba, a young mother living with her husband and five children in Kesum Purbahari, a New Delhi slum, where women with buckets and pails line up at dawn to wait for a tanker truck carrying water. Everyone knows that to drink the thick, brown water from the community standpipe is to risk serious illness or even death. Some days, the tanker doesn't come.

India, with 20% of global population, receives only 4% of the world's annual supply of fresh water. India's groundwater aquifers are quickly disappearing from over-pumping.

Even in prosperous neighborhoods of cities like Delhi and Mumbai, water is available for just a few hours a day -- and often only as a brown and sludgy trickle -- forcing millions of middle class Indians to stumble out of bed at three or four in the morning to turn on their taps.