Shoving People Aside: The Kleptogarchy part 28

Shoving People Aside

Endemic viruses weaken communities. Expulsions break communities up. In China, an unpublished number of people were displaced, moved out, by the mammoth Three Gorges Dam, on which work began in 1994. The estimated totals range from 1.3 million (Chinese Government), 1.4 million – 1.5 million (Antoine Vedeilhe and others for France 24) to 6 million (Dr Brooke Wilmsen at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.[1]) Brooke Wilmsen expanded the count to include people like fishermen whose livelihoods evaporated, and those whose homes disappeared in landslips or floods. It is not done in China to criticise the government, so fears about instability and collapse come mainly from outside the country. Hydraulic engineer Dr Wang Weiluo, working in Germany and not allowed to publish in China, told France 24 that there is distortion in the dam, and that if it broke, the wall of water would submerge Wuhan some 400 kilometres (250 miles) downstream. Coincidentally, Wuhan is widely accepted as the source of Covid-19.

News channel France 24’s ‘China’s Three Gorges Dam Revisited’[2],  released in October 2020, reveals the low compensation paid to those whose homes and farmlands were to be submerged as the waters behind the dam rose 175 metres, just on 569 feet. A displaced farmer said he was offered €3,000 (about £2,520 at the rate on November 21^st 2021) a pension of €6 (£5) a month, and accommodation 800 kilometers (500 miles) away. He chose to remain in a nearby town, renting a tiny room, and is poverty-stricken.

The world’s largest hydro-electric plant is at the dam, with a capacity of 22,500 MW. Each year the plant generates about 85TW hours of electricity, nearly 10% of China’s requirements[3], and saving over 100 million tonnes of CO2. The US Energy Information Administration reckons that, when burned, one ton of coal with 78% carbon content releases 2.86 tons of CO2. So the dam, the largest of 98,000 throughout China, and its hydro plant are better for the environment than coal-fired power stations, surely? Dams create a giant carbon footprint, though. The Three Gorges dam wall contains 27.2 million cubic metres of concrete. The manufacture of each cubic metre emits between 100 and 300 kg of CO2, depending on the composition, so 27.2 million cubic metres would have emitted between 2.7 million and 8.2 million tonnes, which at the upper estimate is a quarter of the annual CO2 emissions of Wales. The dam contains 463,000 tonnes of steel, embodying nearly 857,000 tonnes of CO2. Then there are the 102.6 million cubic metres of earth bulldozed out of the way, the turbines, all the ancillary works, and the ongoing maintenance. Is it fair, then, to class hydro power as renewable?

In operation, hydro power stations are ‘clean’ compared with burning coal. If the 85TW hours of electricity were generated from coal, around 67 million tonnes of CO2 would be added to the atmosphere. That is twice the total emissions from Wales and can be pictured as 13.4 million five-tonne African elephants flying around the sky.

Yet dams are no panacea. Just in China, in August 1975 up to 240,000 people died – no one is quite sure — and 11 million lost their homes, when the Banqiao and Shimantan dams, and 60 others, in Henan province failed after torrential rains.

What often accompanies global heating?

Torrential rains.

[1] https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/announcements/2017/the-dam-that-moves-a-mountain.

[2] Video by Antoine Vedeilhe, Angelique Forget, Camille Despierres, Antoine Morel and Charlie Wang, October 3^rd 2020, on YouTube. 

[3] https://www.power-technology.com/projects/gorges/, accessed November 21^st 2021.