In the early 1990s, Ken Saro-Wiwa led the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) trying to get recognition of the destruction of the environment in "Ogoniland," a terribly polluted region of southeast Nigeria. His execution/murder in 1995 focused attention on the corrupt and authoritarian government of military ruler Sani Abacha. The movement and the struggle Saro-Wiwa started continue. This report comes from Al Jazeera. The video is about 3 minutes long.
Mexico City, a mile and a half above sea level, [is] sinking, collapsing in on itself…
Always short of water, Mexico City keeps drilling deeper for more, weakening the ancient clay lake beds on which the Aztecs first built much of the city, causing it to crumble even further…
It is a cycle made worse by climate change. More heat and drought mean more evaporation and yet more demand for water, adding pressure to tap distant reservoirs at staggering costs or further drain underground aquifers and hasten the city’s collapse…
Props for tilted buildings
The effects of climate change are varied and opportunistic, but one thing is consistent: They are like sparks in the tinder. They expose cities’ biggest vulnerabilities, inflaming troubles that politicians and city planners often ignore or try to paper over. And they spread outward, defying borders…
For many cities around the world, adapting to climate change is a route to long-term prosperity. That’s the good news, where societies are willing to listen. But adaptation can also be costly and slow. It can run counter to the rhythms of political campaigns and headlong into powerful, entrenched interests, confounding business as usual…
Unlike traffic jams or crime, climate change isn’t something most people easily feel or see. It is certainly not what residents in Mexico City talk about every day. But it is like an approaching storm, straining an already precarious social fabric and threatening to push a great city toward a breaking point…
Overseeing the city’s water supply is a thin, patient man with the war-weary air of an old general: Ramón Aguirre Díaz, director of the Water System of Mexico City, is unusually frank about the perils ahead…
If it stops raining in the reservoirs where the city gets its water, “we’re facing a potential disaster,” he said. “There is no way we can provide enough trucks of water to deal with that scenario.”
“If we have the problems that California and São Paulo have had,” he added, “there is the serious possibility of unrest.”…
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The Ministry of Solid Minerals Development on Monday confirmed the discovery of Nickel in parts of Kaduna State in North-West Nigeria.
Permanent Secretary, Mohammed Abbas [of the Ministry of Solid Minerals Development] said the ministry had been following up on the report by its technical experts since the first discovery was made several months ago…
Kaduna state
Nickel could potentially be a high foreign exchange earner for Nigeria, particularly at a time the country's economy was facing the blight of declining global crude oil prices…
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The Comparative Government and Politics Review Checklist.
Two pages summarizing the course requirements to help you review and study for the final and for the big exam in May. . It contains a description of comparative methods, a list of commonly used theories, a list of vital concepts, thumbnail descriptions of the AP6, and
a description of the AP exam format. $2.00. Order HERE.
Militants are roaming oil-soaked creeks in the south, blowing up pipelines and decimating the nation’s oil production. Islamist extremists have killed thousands in the north. Deadly land battles are shaking the nation’s center. And a decades-old separatist movement at the heart of a devastating civil war is brewing again.
On their own, any one of these would be a national emergency. But here in Nigeria, they are all happening at the same time, tearing at the country from almost every angle…
Mr. Buhari took office a year ago, promising to stamp out terrorism in the north and to rebuild the nation’s economy…
Beyond low prices for the nation’s oil, the source of more than 70 percent of the government’s revenue, Nigerian officials have been tormented by a new band of militants claiming to be on a quest to free the oil-producing south from oppression. They call themselves the Niger Delta Avengers…
As a result, Nigeria’s oil production in the second quarter this year dropped 25 percent from the same period a year earlier…
“We are not asking for much, but to free the people of the Niger Delta from environmental pollution, slavery and oppression,” the Avengers wrote on their website…
On the opposite side of the country, Boko Haram is still raging…
Another longtime battle is flaring in the middle of the country, between farmers and nomadic Fulani herdsmen looking for grazing pastures. Hundreds have been killed in battles as herdsmen roam into new territory to look for vegetation for their cattle…
And with their demands for economic equality for the south, the Avengers have been trying to stoke the aspirations of separatists elsewhere in the nation…
Now, a Biafran separatist movement is simmering again…
The south has long been a reservoir of anger and resistance, a place where countless billions in oil revenue are extracted for the benefit of distant politicians and companies abroad. Yet drinking water and electricity can be scarce, and the swamps people live around are regularly polluted…
Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed. Use the search box to look for country names or concept labels attached to each entry.
Amazon's customers gave this book a 5-star rating.
The Comparative Government and Politics Review Checklist.
Two pages summarizing the course requirements to help you review and study for the final and for the big exam in May. . It contains a description of comparative methods, a list of commonly used theories, a list of vital concepts, thumbnail descriptions of the AP6, and
a description of the AP exam format. $2.00. Order HERE.
Red has been considered the color of prosperity and good fortune in China for centuries, and it is also the color of the Communist Party. But this week, the color took on a darker meaning here, as it began to symbolize the failure of the party to rein in toxic smog that regularly endangers the health of hundreds of millions of people in the country’s north.
The Beijing government sounded its first-ever air pollution red alert Monday night, prompting many of the city’s 22 million residents to take precautions through Thursday, when strong winds blew the smog away. The emergency measures ended at noon...
Behavior changed, and so did the mind-set, in another of the touchstone moments that have occurred regularly since 2012, when the party began relaxing its tight control over information on air quality.
Since then, crucial decisions made every few months by senior Chinese officials have broadened the public’s understanding of the environmental degradation afflicting the nation, and they have given people more tools to gauge methods for protecting themselves. But those decisions — the red alert being the latest — have also raised questions about whether the party is up to the herculean challenge of cleaning up China’s environment.
On no other issue are President Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders forced to walk such a fine line, between controlling information that has the potential to undermine their legitimacy and doling it out to increasingly anxious citizens who consider such disclosures essential…
[The] mayor of Beijing, Wang Anshun, has acknowledged that public environmental awareness, while perhaps leading to more criticism of China’s development path and weak regulatory efforts, is needed to help solve the crisis.
“We must take effective measures and enforce them with no reductions,” he said at a meeting on Dec. 4, according to an official news report. “We must accept supervision from the public and the media, in order to win the battle against the imminent heavy air pollution.”
Mr. Wang made earlier remarks that showed he knew what is at stake — perhaps nothing less than the faith of the people in the party…
Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed. Use the search box to look for country names or concept labels attached to each entry.
The Comparative Government and Politics Review Checklist.
Two pages summarizing the course requirements to help you review and study for the final and for the big exam in May. . It contains a description of comparative methods, a list of commonly used theories, a list of vital concepts, thumbnail descriptions of the AP6, and
a description of the AP exam format. $2.00. Order HERE.
Just The Facts! 2nd editionis a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on May's exam.
THE capital’s “airpocalypse”, the choking smog that descended on Beijing in the winter of 2012-13, galvanised public opinion and spooked the government. The strange thing is, though, that information about air pollution—how extensive it is, how much damage it does—has long been sketchy…
Responding to the outcry, the government set up a national air-reporting system which now has almost 1,000 monitoring stations… Scientists from Berkeley Earth, a not-for-profit foundation in America, have trawled through this recent cloud of data for the four months… and emerged with the most detailed and up-to-date picture of Chinese air pollution so far.
Pollution is sky-high everywhere in China. Some 83% of Chinese are exposed to air that, in America, would be deemed by the Environmental Protection Agency either to be unhealthy or unhealthy for sensitive groups. Almost half the population of China experiences levels of PM2.5 that are above America’s highest threshold…
Berkeley Earth’s scientific director, Richard Muller, says breathing Beijing’s air is the equivalent of smoking almost 40 cigarettes a day…
The sliver of good news is that pollution levels are better in some places than in others. They are… least bad in the south… probably because that area was washed by monsoon rains during the period of the study. More importantly, levels of PM2.5 in large western cities such as Chongqing and Chengdu are about half the national average. Figuring out what they are doing right would be a first step towards reducing the smog elsewhere.
Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed. Use the search box to look for country names or concept labels attached to each entry.
Just The Facts! 2nd editionis a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on May's exam.
The Great Wall of China. The Three Gorges Dam. The Grand Canal. And now The Great South-North Water Transfer Project.
The beginnings of the Great Wall go back 2,700 years. The Three Gorges Dam was begun in 1994 and completed in 2012. The Grand Canal, linking the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, was begun 2,500 years ago and the various sections were linked together during the Sui dynasty. All of these audacious projects stand as monuments to Chinese technology and capacity.
Now comes a new huge project. Is this a sign of powerful state? Is it a sign of mis-analyzed economics? Or just as sensible as the water systems that feed California's Central Valley and Los Angeles?
The new waterway is part of the biggest water-diversion scheme in the world: the second arm of what is known as the South-North Water Diversion Project. This is designed to solve an age-old imbalance. The north of China has only a fifth of the country’s naturally available fresh water but two-thirds of the farmland. The problem has grown in recent decades because of rapid urban growth and heavy pollution of scarce water supplies.
The result is a chronic shortage… In 2009 the government said that nearly half the water in seven main rivers in China was unfit for human consumption. All this has encouraged ever greater use of groundwater. Much of this is now polluted too…
South-North Water Transfer Project
In late October the… new watercourse… will push 13 billion cubic metres of water more than 1,200km from the Danjiangkou dam in the central province of Hubei to the capital, Beijing. The aim is to allow industry and agriculture to keep functioning… The new canal will help avert an imminent crisis. But the gap between water supply and demand will remain large and keep growing…
By increasing supply, the government is failing to confront the real source of the problem: high demand for water and inefficient use of it. Chinese industry uses ten times more water per unit of production than the average in industrialised countries… A big reason for this is that water in China is far too cheap. In May 2014 Beijing introduced a new system that makes tap water more expensive the more people use. But prices are still far from market levels…
[Officials] do not want to scare industries away from cities by charging them more for water. They also do not want to face angry protests by residents. Hence they prefer shifting water around in pipes and canals. Britt Crow-Miller of Portland State University describes the diversion project as “a physical demonstration of political power”…
Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed. Use the search box to look for country names or concept labels attached to each entry.
Why is Amnesty International investigating this? Why not the state or national government? What are the political implications of the answers? Who is going to deal with the problem(s)? Why is there no "Co-ordinated action from the industry, government, security forces, civil society and others"? You don't think there's any corruption involved?
Amnesty International has accused major oil companies, including Shell, of failing to report the true picture of oil spills in Nigeria.
Amnesty says oil companies often blame oil spills on sabotage in order to get out of paying compensation when in fact corroded pipes are the cause…
Niger Delta pollution
Shell said it "firmly rejects unsubstantiated assertions".
It highlighted the issue of theft of crude oil, which it said "remains the main cause of oil pollution in the Delta"…
Working with a local human rights group, Amnesty studied the oil spill investigation process in Nigeria over six months.
It claims there is "no legitimate basis" for the oil companies' claims that the vast majority of spills are caused by sabotage and theft.
Members of the local community together with oil company staff and government officials are supposed to investigate oil spills, but Amnesty calls this Joint Investigation Visit (JIV) process "wholly unreliable" because, it says, the companies themselves are the primary investigators and the process lacks transparency.
It says this means that both the causes and severity of oil spills may therefore be misrecorded, sometimes meaning affected communities miss out on compensation…
Shell said it "firmly rejects" the claims.
"We seek to bring greater transparency and independent oversight to the issue of oil spills, and will continue to find ways to enhance this."
It said the JIV process was a federal process the company could not unilaterally change.
Stolen oil, Shell said, costs Nigeria billions of dollars in lost revenue.
"Co-ordinated action from the industry, government, security forces, civil society and others is needed to end this criminality, which remains the main cause of oil pollution in the Delta today," Shell said…
"In a report released on Thursday, Amnesty International attacks the multinational company, Shell, for too quickly attributing oil spills to sabotage and theft by outsiders. It also accused Agip, a subsidiary of Eni, of not properly controlling its activities…
"The report says: 'Shell has claimed that... oil spill investigations are sound when they are not, that sites are cleaned up when they are not, and that the company is transparent when, in reality, it maintains very tight control over every piece of information - deciding what to disclose and what to withhold.'
"In a press release accompanying the report, Amnesty acknowledges Shell has improved its investigations since 2011, but says 'serious flaws remain, including weaknesses in the underlying evidence used to attribute spills to sabotage.'…
"No response was immediately forthcoming from Shell Nigeria, but The Guardian in London reported the company's London office as rejecting what it called 'unsubstantiated assertions that [Shell Nigeria] have exaggerated the impact of crude oil theft and sabotage to distract attention from operational performance.'
Shell said it wanted 'greater transparency and independent oversight' in handling oil spills. It also said it could not unilaterally change the process of investigating spills, which also involved regulatory bodies, Nigeria's ministry of environment, the police, state government and local communities.
Political power depends upon political stability. Political stability depends upon economic growth. Economic growth depends upon adequate resources. What happens if the resources aren't adequate?
CHINA endures choking smog, mass destruction of habitats and food poisoned with heavy metals. But ask an environmentalist what is the country’s biggest problem, and the answer is always the same. “Water is the worst,” says Wang Tao, of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Centre in Beijing…
The country uses 600 billion cubic metres (21,200 billion cubic feet) of water a year, or about 400 cubic metres a person—one-quarter of what the average American uses and less than half the international definition of water stress.
The national average hides an even more alarming regional disparity. Four-fifths of China’s water is in the south, notably the Yangzi river basin. Half the people and two-thirds of the farmland are in the north, including the Yellow River basin. Beijing has the sort of water scarcity usually associated with Saudi Arabia: just 100 cubic metres per person a year. The water table under the capital has dropped by 300 metres (nearly 1,000 feet) since the 1970s.
China is using up water at an unsustainable rate. Thanks to overuse, rivers simply disappear… As if that were not bad enough, China is polluting what little water it has left…
In 2009 the World Bank put the overall cost of China’s water crisis at 2.3% of GDP, mostly reflecting damage to health. Water shortages also imperil plans to expand energy production, threatening economic growth…
Rather than making sensible and eminently doable reforms in pricing and water conservation, China is focusing on increasing supplies. For decades the country has been ruled by engineers, many of them hydraulic engineers (including the previous president, Hu Jintao). Partly as a result, Communist leaders have reacted to water problems by building engineering projects on a mind-boggling scale…
The best known such project is… the South-North Water Diversion Project, it will link the Yangzi with the Yellow River, taking water from the humid south to the parched north. When finished, 3,000km of tunnels and canals…
The environmental damage could be immense. The Yangzi river is already seriously polluted…
Sometimes, even in an authoritarian system, externalities become important. Deadly air pollution, undrinkable water, dead pigs in rivers, and contaminated food can take legitimacy away from a non-democratic regime whose leaders promise to make things better for people.
And, in China, it's necessary to pay attention to the state owned enterprises (SOEs) that dominate the economy. The people in charge of them would be called oligarchs if they were in Russia. As Party bigwigs as well as industrial magnates they wield a lot of power. And they have vested interests in promoting growth above all else.
The cost of environmental degradation in China was about $230 billion in 2010, or 3.5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product… The statistic came from a study by the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning, which is part of the Ministry of Environmental Protection. [It] is based on costs arising from pollution and damage to the ecosystem…
Beijing smog, August 2005
The rapidly eroding environment across the country has become an issue of paramount concern to many Chinese. In January, outrage boiled over as air pollution in north China reached record levels, well beyond what Western environmental agencies consider hazardous. The public fury forced propaganda officials to allow official Chinese news organizations to report more candidly on the pollution.
Chinese state-owned enterprises in the oil and power industries have consistently blocked efforts by pro-environment government officials to impose policies that would alleviate the pollution.
The Beijing government on Thursday released details of a three-year plan that is aimed at curbing various forms of pollution… The report quoted Wang Anshun, Beijing’s mayor, as saying that sewage treatment, garbage incineration and forestry development would cost at least $16 billion…
There is consensus now that China’s decades of double-digit economic growth exacted an enormous environmental cost. But growth remains the priority; the Communist Party’s legitimacy is based largely on rapidly expanding the economy... A Deutsche Bank report released last month said the current growth policies would lead to a continuing steep decline of the environment for the next decade, especially given the expected coal consumption and boom in automobile sales.
China’s toll from pollution was the loss of 25 million healthy years of life from the population.
The data on which the analysis is based was first presented in the ambitious 2010 Global Burden of Disease Study, which was published in December in The Lancet, a British medical journal. The authors decided to break out numbers for specific countries and present the findings at international conferences. The China statistics were offered at a forum in Beijing on Sunday...
What the researchers called “ambient particulate matter pollution” was the fourth-leading risk factor for deaths in China in 2010, behind dietary risks, high blood pressure and smoking...
Calculations of premature deaths because of outdoor air pollution are politically threatening in the eyes of some Chinese officials. According to news reports, Chinese officials cut out sections of a 2007 report called “Cost of Pollution in China” that discussed premature deaths...
There has been growing outrage in Chinese cities over what many say are untenable levels of air pollution. Cities across the north hit record levels in January, and official Chinese newspapers ran front-page articles on the surge — what some foreigners call the “airpocalypse” — despite earlier limits on such discussion by propaganda officials.
In February, the State Council, China’s cabinet, announced a timeline for introducing new fuel standards, but state-owned oil and power companies are known to block or ignore environmental policies to save on costs...
There are news reports on the attempt last year to reduce or remove the government subsidy for fuel (gasoline, diesel, kerosene, etc.), the sad state of Nigeria's infrastructure (electrical grid, highways, safe water, airports, etc.), and on the danger to Jonathan's presidency caused by all those things.
In addition, I offer a May 2012 interview with President Jonathan. The first topic is the fuel subsidy. Later he talks about Boko Haram. Most of us Americans will have difficulty understanding Jonathan because of his accent. You'll have to concentrate.
Here also is a January 2013 interview of President Jonathan by Christiane Amanpour.
And if all that's not enough, here's a cartoon from Nigeria about one of the effects of rising fuel prices.
And finally, here's a 22-minute video about oil spills.
Edward Wong, writing in The New York Times, makes a good anecdotal case for the emergence of some post-materialist politics in China. Will that change the political culture?
Barely two months into their jobs, the Communist Party’s new leaders are being confronted by the challenges posed by a constituency that has generally been one of the party’s most ardent supporters: the middle-class and well-off Chinese who have benefited from a three-decade economic boom…
For years, many China observers have asserted that the party’s authoritarian system endures because ordinary Chinese buy into a grand bargain: the party guarantees economic growth, and in exchange the people do not question the way the party rules. Now, many whose lives improved under the boom are reneging on their end of the deal, and in ways more vocal than ever before…
Few are advocating an overthrow of the party. Many just want the system to provide a more secure life. But in doing so, they are demanding something that challenges the very nature of the party-controlled state: transparency.
More and more Chinese say they distrust the Wizard-of-Oz-style of control the Communist Party has exercised since it seized power in 1949, and they are asking their leaders to disseminate enough information so they can judge whether officials, who are widely believed to be corrupt, are doing their jobs properly…
Some Chinese say that they and their compatriots, especially younger ones, are starting to realize that a secure life is dependent on the defense of certain principles, perhaps most crucially freedom of expression, and not just on the government meeting material needs…
Any official commitment to transparency, though, could be fragile. After Hu Jintao and Mr. Wen took charge of the state in 2003, they opened up reporting on the SARS virus, which raised expectations for a more liberal administration. But the leaders dashed those hopes by enacting conservative policies…
Will Ross, a BBC reporter, describes the production end of the oil bunkering business in the Niger Delta. The limited capacity of the state, corruption, and the desperate poverty of the Ogoni people all contribute to the survival of this illegal business.
There is also a good video in which Ross offers a guided tour of one of the primitive oil "refineries" in the delta.
Will Ross got a rare look at an illegal oil refinery in Nigeria
Illegal refinery
"Here is our business place," a man, who did not want to give his real name but asked to be called Edward, told me as we walked around a remote, heavily polluted palm-tree fringed creek in Ogoniland in the Niger Delta.
"We use these to go and collect our natural resources - our crude oil," he said, pointing to a locally carved boat lying on its side.
In the middle of the night, to avoid detection, they break into the multinational oil companies' pipelines and help themselves…
Dotted along the creek were dozens of large drums used for boiling up the crude oil.
They had pipes protruding from them leading to troughs into which the products are collected; kerosene and petrol for the local market and diesel which is taken away on barges or inland on trucks by traders.
Next to each home-made refinery are pits full of bitumen which is sold to road construction companies.
"Almost 400 people work here and every night we produce around 11,000 litres of diesel," said 32-year-old Edward, adding that his elder brothers had learnt all about the business in Bakassi, near the Cameroonian border with Nigeria…
The military is supposed to be stopping all this and some operations have been disrupted but the effort is seriously hampered by the desire to get in on the action.
"We settle with the army people. If they see money in your hand they will take that," Edward said.
"If not they will take products from you. If we have 10 drums we will give them two," he said, adding, "It's very normal." …
Environmental disaster and public information in China
Melody Dickison, who teaches in Huber Heights, OH, sent me a link to this article from The Guardian (UK). It's a good reminder that watching how a political system responds to major events can be a good lesson in how the system works (or doesn't work). Thanks, Melody.
China has had a couple environmental problems recently. Has China done a better job covering up its oil disasters than the US did? Is this a matter of government policy or commercial concern? Or both? Or is it just an artifact of complex situations?
Polluted water. Murky information. Public anger. Government promises of transparency and oversight to prevent a recurrence. And then, a short time later, it all happens again.
Watching the 840 square km oil slick now polluting China's Bohai Sea and listening to the excuses of the companies and officials involved, it is hard to avoid a sense of deja-vu.
It has taken a month for news to emerge about the leak from a well in the Penglai 19-3 field operated by the US energy company ConocoPhillips in partnership with the China National Offshore Oil Corporation…
Xinhua, the state newswire, has blamed the US oil company for the leak and quoted officials who claimed the slow release of official information was due to "technical limits"…
Bunmi Oloruntoba, a Nigerian living in the USA, writes a blog he calls, A Bombastic Element. He pointed out a photo essay in The Atlantic about Nigeria's relationship to oil. It's a powerful illustration of something that our textbooks vainly try to describe. Students out to see these pictures when learning about Nigerian politics. Notice how often Ogoniland is mentioned?
For over 50 years now, the extraction of crude oil and natural gas from Nigeria's Niger Delta has meant wealth for a privileged few but has exacted heavy costs on residents and the environment. Nigeria is the world's 8th largest producer of crude oil, yet remains one of its poorest nations -- an estimated 70 percent of its 150 million residents live below the poverty line. The environment is paying a steep price as well. An estimated 500 million gallons of oil have spilled into the delta -- the equivalent of roughly one Exxon Valdez disaster per year. A number of factors have contributed to these disasters: poor construction and maintenance, lax regulation, militant attacks, and petroleum thieves, not to mention government instability and abuse of power. According to cables released by WikiLeaks, Shell Oil claimed to have planted staff in all of Nigeria's main ministries, gaining access to key government decisions. Gathered here are some scenes from Nigeria's long, disastrous relationship with the crude oil industry.
[M]ore oil is spilled from the delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP's Deepwater Horizon rig last month…
On 1 May this year a ruptured ExxonMobil pipeline in the state of Akwa Ibom spilled more than a million gallons into the delta over seven days before the leak was stopped. Local people demonstrated against the company but say they were attacked by security guards. Community leaders are now demanding $1bn in compensation for the illness and loss of livelihood they suffered. Few expect they will succeed. In the meantime, thick balls of tar are being washed up along the coast…
"If this Gulf accident had happened in Nigeria, neither the government nor the company would have paid much attention," said the writer Ben Ikari, a member of the Ogoni people. "This kind of spill happens all the time in the delta."…
"We see frantic efforts being made to stop the spill in the US," said Nnimo Bassey, Nigerian head of Friends of the Earth International. "But in Nigeria, oil companies largely ignore their spills, cover them up and destroy people's livelihood and environments…
It is impossible to know how much oil is spilled in the Niger delta each year because the companies and the government keep that secret. However, two major independent investigations over the past four years suggest that as much is spilled at sea, in the swamps and on land every year as has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico so far…
The scale of the pollution is mind-boggling. The government's national oil spill detection and response agency (Nosdra) says that between 1976 and 1996 alone, more than 2.4m barrels contaminated the environment. "Oil spills and the dumping of oil into waterways has been extensive, often poisoning drinking water and destroying vegetation. These incidents have become common due to the lack of laws and enforcement measures within the existing political regime," said a spokesman for Nosdra…
Worse may be to come. One industry insider, who asked not to be named, said: "Major spills are likely to increase in the coming years as the industry strives to extract oil from increasingly remote and difficult terrains. Future supplies will be offshore, deeper and harder to work. When things go wrong, it will be harder to respond."…
Environmental degradation and the resulting human suffering are major problems in China and most developing countries (think about the Nigerian oil fields or the water supply in Mexico City). Politically, governments have to deal with limitations on their capacities, demands for economic growth, the health of the people, and the likely long-term consequences of the choices they make today. These photographs make the Chinese case come alive.
The unnamed blogger noted that October 14 was "the 30th annual awards ceremony of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund took place at the Asia Society in New York City. Lu Guang (卢广) from People’s Republic of China won the $30,000 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his documentary project “Pollution in China.”
10. In Inner Mongolia there were 2 “black dragons” from the Lasengmiao Power Plant (内蒙古拉僧庙发电厂) covering the nearby villages. July 26, 2005 Get your copy ofWhat You Need to Know
When ethnic and economic cleavages coincide, theory says the divisions are strengthened. What happens then, if population growth and climate change dissolve the geographic cleavages that kept those groups apart?
Amid deadly clashes with farmers and expulsion orders by state authorities, thousands of nomadic herders in Nigeria do not know where to turn.
The latest clashes, in Plateau state state on 6 and 7 June, started with the alleged killing of an ethnic Chala woman by some Fulani nomads in a dispute over her farmland... family members of the slain woman killed two Fulani pastoralists in a reprisal attack...
A local expert says effects of climate change are partly to blame for the disputes. Northern nomadic communities are increasingly moving southwards as climate change turns their grazing land into desert...
"Given the volatility of Wase [in Plateau state]... that has witnessed communal unrest and remains a flash point, the arrival of the migrants became a matter of security concern to the immediate communities, traditional rulers and the local government council," said Plateau information commissioner Yenlong. "Our action is based on security considerations and not on ethnic or sectarian motives."
Ethno-religious clashes in the town of Jos, in northern Plateau, in November 2008 claimed hundreds of lives...
Politics is polarized along ethnic and religious lines in Plateau state, partly because of the way Nigerian politics defines local rights by whether or not residents are indigenous. Many Muslims are not considered indigenous and feel dominated by Christian-dominated party rule, according to Nigeria analysts.
The areas in question are federal grazing reserves, earmarked as international cattle routes since 1956...
Teaching (and learning) comparative government and politics is a complex and demanding task. We can all use all the help we can get. This cyber place is somewhere to facilitate helpful interactions.
Just The Facts! 2nd edition is a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on May's exam.
