Grid and Greed

As mentioned in this article from the National Geographic Correspondent on Water issues, India "suffers from inertia on one hand and from destructive greed on the other. It doesn’t suffer from a shortage of dams"
But there are other related issues which complicate the situation.
Of course, great is the temptation to built new dams, under the pretext to 'produce more', in reality to mint more money like in the Arunachal Pradesh case.
An article in Nature China warns us: "Climate change: Melting ice before your eyes".
Glaciologist Tandong Yao at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and his colleagues say: "Glaciers in the Himalayas have shrunk over the past 30 years", adding: 

The Tibetan Plateau holds one of the largest numbers of glaciers in the world. These glaciers are at the headwaters of many prominent Asian rivers and play important roles in local ecosystems. Recently, however, controversy has raged as to whether glaciers in the Tibetan Plateau are experiencing shrinkage due to global climate change.

Tandong Yao studied differences in status of 7,090 glaciers between the 1970s and 2000s using topographic maps, satellite images and on-site observations. They found that the Himalayas (excluding the Karakorum) experienced the most intensive shrinkage, and that the extent of shrinkage decreases from the Himalayas to the continental interior. 
Interestingly they warned: "if glacier shrinkage continues in the Himalayas, downstream regions could experience unsustainable alterations to water supplies and growing incidences of geohazards."
Even more worrying is the desertification of the Tibetan plateau.
According to Xinhua, as a result of global warming the Qinghai-Tibet Railway is being threatened by desertification on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau .

Photo: Nature China

Wang Jinchang, a senior engineer with the Qinghai-Tibet Railway Company told the Chinese news agency that about 443 kilometers of the 1,956-km railway are in areas affected by desertification, including 103 km that lie in seriously desertified areas.
Wang affirmed that the threat of soil erosion has grown very fast in recent years, mostly near rivers and wetlands from Golmud and Lhasa, and the amount of affected rail tracks almost doubled from 2003 to 2009.
Another expert in soil erosion control, An Fengjie, from China's State Forestry Administrations stated that the plateau region suffered from desertification long before the railway was built: "The railway did not cause the problem, but it gives us an opportunity to witness the severity and scale of soil erosion on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau." 
The Chinese will not admit that the railway line made the situation worse. It appears that sands buried rail racks and disrupted train services over 1,362 times from 1984 to 2002 on the Xining-Golmud section of the railway.
Xinhua says that one of the most prevalent theories blames global warming for the ecological deterioration in the plateau region.
According to Sun Zhizhong, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the temperatures on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau rose over two degrees Celsius on average over the past three years, leaving large chunks of frozen earth to defrost.
One of the consequences is that the Kokonor (or Qinghai Lake), China's largest saltwater lake keeps expanding.
For a long time, this phenomenon remained unexplained.
Xinhua reported yesterday: "The surface area of China's largest inland saltwater lake has been expanding for eight years, according to the latest remote sensing survey."
Zhou Bingrong, deputy chief of the provincial institute of meteorological sciences found out that:

The Qinghai Lake in northwest China's Qinghai province measured 4,354.28 square km, according to satellite data collected on July 19 and published on Sunday, s. The figure was 14.58 square km larger than the same time last year, and the largest in 12 years.

Zhou's institute has been carrying out dynamic surveillance of the lake's surface area since 2001, when the lake was shrinking due to climate change and human activity. 
Zhou takes the credit for the increase of the lake: "We have noticed an apparent increase of water since 2005, thanks to more rainfall and sustained environmental protection efforts," but the increase in the waters filling up the lake is more likely to be due to climate change and melting of permafrost".
The Qinghai Lake had been shrinking since the 1950s, but now is increasing.

India is bound to have new black-outs, if new measures as the ones suggested by Himanshu Thakkar in the article below are not urgently taken.
But is there the will to bring out meaningful changes.
The problem is that these measures may not fill the politicians pockets, while building new dams will do. 
It may be difficult for the grid to prevail over the greed.
There is another angle to the blackout: computer hackers.
In August 2003, a blackout occurred in North America, leaving 50 million people in the dark for four days.
Bloomberg wrote: "[it] provides a glimpse of the havoc a cyber attack could inflict on the nation’s power grid." 
Adding: "Internet-based terrorists would be capable of causing blackouts “on the order of nine to 18 months” by disabling critical systems such as transformers, said Joe Weiss, managing director of Applied Control Solutions LLC, a Cupertino, California-based security consulting company."
Apparently the 2003 event was triggered when a power line touched tree branches in Ohio; it ultimately caused losses of as much as $10 billion, according to a study by the U.S. and Canadian governments.
According to Bloomberg that: "Energy companies including utilities would have to increase their investment in computer security more than seven-fold to reach an ideal level of protection."
A Bloomberg survey of network managers at 21 energy companies found that companies spend an average of $45.8 million a year on computer security and are able to prevent 69 percent of known cyber strikes against their systems.
It is quite ominous!
Though in the case of India, external hackers are not required. Undisciplined Electricity Boards will continue to do the job.


India’s Massive Blackout, and the Environmental Danger to Come
Dan Morrison
National Geographic News Correspondent in Water Currents 
July 31, 2012
An estimated 600 million Indians – more people than live in western Europe — were without electricity today, victims of a massive blackout that darkened most of the northern and eastern portions of the country.
The Great Indian Outage, stretching from New Delhi to Kolkata, comes just a day after 300 million people in northern India lost power for much of Monday.
It is a disaster that’s caused untold damage to India’s economy, its prestige, and its well-being – think of the millions of patients in hospitals, the commuters stuck on trains, and farmers in need of irrigation. Hundreds of miners in the states of West Bengal and Jharkand were trapped underground by the blackout. Some 300 trains were reportedly stalled across the country.
There’s more damage to come, I fear: Forces that have been bridling against environmental regulations and science-based activism will use the Great Outage as a cudgel to demolish future restraints on dam construction, coal mining, and other projects.
India’s humiliating power failure is sure to birth a slogan as reductive and wrong as America’s own “Drill Baby Drill.”
The irony is that this outage was likely caused in part by mismanagement at the Bhakra series of hydroelectric dams in Punjab and Himachal Pradesh states in northern India, according to Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People.
“Had these dams been operated more rationally, keeping in mind the emerging realities and forecasts, the situation in Northwest India would have been different,” Thakkar told me. “Higher [water] levels in these dams would have meant more power generation for each unit of water release and at the same time more water for agriculture, thus less water [for irrigation] pumped from aquifers, and thus less demand of power.”
Earlier this month, Thakkar’s organization published a short paper criticizing dam administrators for allowing water levels to become alarmingly low.
Thakkar says the answer to India’s current power crisis isn’t more hydroelectric dams, as most currently existing dams aren’t built or operated for maximum efficiency. Instead, power can be saved by harvesting rainwater.
“Since most of our water is coming from groundwater, we need to store the rainfall in aquifers that are fast depleting,” he says. “This would have multiple spin-off benefits.” With healthier aquifers, farmers wouldn’t have to run electric-powered pumps as much to adequately irrigate their crops – a major drag on the power grid.
“More dams won’t help achieve that,” Thakkar says, adding that farmers should shift to less water-intensive crops. “It is amazing that, among all the crops, [acreage devoted to] sugarcane has gone up in this drought year!”
At the Center for Science and the Environment, Chandra Bushan provides some of the hard numbers behind today’s blackout, as well as a simple cause: Indian states are taking more power from the grid than they are supposed to, even as the power system lacks the flexibility to meet seasonal spikes in demand.
In this case, a weak and tardy annual monsoon has millions of households and businesses running their air conditioners for longer than they would under normal conditions. This from the CSE:
Electricity generation for the month of June illustrates this problem:
In June 2012, India produced 8 per cent more electricity than in June 2011.
The generation from thermal power plants was 11.4 per cent higher than in June 2011. Coal-based power plants generated 16.7 per cent more electricity.
However, with low monsoon, the generation of electricity from hydropower plants reduced by 6 per cent compared to June 2011. In fact, hydropower plants produced 19 per cent lesser electricity in April-June, 2012 than the corresponding months in 2011. As hydro plants are also peak load plants, this reduction seems to have affected the peak power generation in the country significantly.
None of this logic – nor the many recent plans and ideas for improving the management and efficiency of India’s power grid – will make a difference to the contractors and bureaucrats in the “Build Baby Build” crowd that has much to gain from poorly-planned dam construction.
The debate over dams has become so silly that earlier this month a minister from the government of Uttarakhand state went on a one-day hunger strike to support more construction on the Himalayan tributaries of the Ganges River. Mantri Prasad Naithani’s constituency is in the region of Tehri Gahrwal, which was submerged a decade ago by the giant Tehri dam. Residents of the doomed town of Tehri were relocated to a “model town” higher up the valley to make room for the $1 billion, 1,000 megawatt hydroelectric dam’s reservoir.
When I visited New Tehri last year, power outages were commonplace.
But it’s brute force, not the rhetorical kind, that truly keeps this movement alive.
On June 22, the Indian environmentalist Bharat Jhunjhunwala was attacked in his home in Uttarakhand state by a gang of 40 thugs purportedly working for a contracting company. At the time of the attack, Jhunjhunwala, 62, had been hosting G.D. Agrawal, an eminent scientist turned swami who is also known as Gyan Swarup Anand. Agrawal was in the region to protest the coming submergence of the Dhari Devi Temple on the Alaknanda river by a hydroelectric project.
In full view of local police and journalists, the crowd kicked in Jhunjhunwalla’s door and blackened his face with ink. He and his wife were forced to flee the area.
“They threatened him that they will burn him alive in the house if he did not stop opposing the dams within two days,” according to an account by Jhunjhunwala’s family.
India’s power grid suffers from inertia on one hand and from destructive greed on the other. It doesn’t suffer from a shortage of dams.

The Waters of the Third Pole

This report The Waters of the Third Pole prepared by Aon Benfi eld UCL (Hazard Research Centre, University College London), China Dialogue, Humanitarian Futures Programme (King’s College London) has an interesting annexe. 
It says: "The following stories are not necessarily intended to approximate reality, but this approach can be used to challenge conventional thinking and to enable policy- and decision-makers to think ‘out of the box’."
Is this scenario so improbable? 


China’s water, 2020–2025: scarcity, pollution and conflict
Over the past decade, the Chinese government has failed to address underlying structural issues in domestic water allocation, develop adequate systems of water pricing and rights, curb waste or allow water trading. Instead, government response has been to rely on water-transfer projects and to limit water allocations to provinces, rather than to promote conservation through regulatory or market mechanisms. By 2020, unregulated economic activity and over-exploitation of limited or contaminated water sources had combined to push China’s water crisis into catastrophic proportions.
Groundwater tables under the northern plain have dried up, or at least sunk so deep that farmers are unable to extract the remaining water. Continued erratic rainfall and rising temperatures have rendered the Yellow River and its major tributaries seasonal resources. The Shiyang River in Gansu has completely disappeared. The oases of the northern plains are particularly reliant on glacier meltwater, and many, like that of Minqin County, have been completely evacuated. The early 2020s saw the water availability per person in the Hai, Huai, and Yellow (Huang) river basins fall well below 500m3/year, less than the minimum for human existence. In this former breadbasket, desertification continues to overwhelm arable land. Dwindling glaciers have caused the Gobi desert to encroach further upon the oases in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Desertification now affects 600 million people, nearly half the country’s population.
Policies of state-directed environmental migration have now relocated 3 million farmers and nomadic herders in Qinghai, Ningxia and Gansu to Xingjiang and Inner Mongolia. This is having enormous environmental and social repercussions since these now-arid destinations themselves are unable to provide adequate support for increasing populations and there is not enough arable land for migrants to sustain new livelihoods. Ethnic tensions have been escalating in China’s western hinterlands, with increasing violence. These incidents culminated in a series of savage riots that spread from Hohot, Lhasa and Urumqi throughout urban centres in the region in June 2020.
Conflict driven by water stress
As the summer of 2020 progressed, severe droughts, worse even than in 2019, threatened to drive the 200 million inhabitants of the North China plain into potential starvation, and the army is enforcing water rationing in the overrun cities of Beijing and Tianjin. In the run-up to the National People’s Congress in October 2020, the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang announced the launch of the construction of the western section of the South–North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP), aimed at increasing crop production in the Gobi desert and easing over-crowding in the east. In an attempt to gain popular support as the national water crisis accelerated, the Chinese leaders disregarded international agreements and abandoned any effort to carry out an Environmental Impact Assessment – despite the serious pollution associated with construction of the central section of the project.
India–China relations have been at an all-time low since the completion of the 40,000MW dam at the ‘Great Bend’ of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River in 2019, harnessing the power of the deepest canyon in the world. This far exceeds the scale of projects such as the Three Gorges Dam, and the Indians claim that maximum river flow has already been reduced by 20%, while the Chinese refute such accusations. On 1 October 2025, Chinese National Day, Chandra Singh, the Indian President announced that, unless China discontinued water-transfer plans, India would make an official declaration of war. In the first weeks of October, India deployed an extra 60,000 troops in the border area and strengthened air defence in Ladakh. Seemingly, uncontrolled skirmishes broke out between troops on the border, resulting in casualties on both sides. Chinese internal conflicts over water allocation and pollution were so widespread that the threat to national security provided a useful focus for the government as it aimed to encourage patriotic unity against a common enemy.
Chinese troops were deployed to quell rising dissent within Tibet about environmental damage caused by mega-infrastructure projects. Chinese nuclear missile deployment in Haiyun and Da Qaidam in Qinghai province was confirmed, but the international community remained powerless. No bilateral agreement was ever reached between India and China after the memorandum of agreement to share hydrology data in 2002 degenerated into a means for China to exhort payment from India in return for often-dubious information. Attempts by NGOs to establish an international dialogue and roadmap towards a ‘benefit-sharing’ agreement have failed, and the international community can only watch and wait.
In the face of these Chinese actions, India has pursued its own grand plans. By 2019 a canal had been constructed to move water from the upper parts of the Ganges, Yamuna and Brahmaputra Rivers westward, ending in the Luni and Sabarmati Rivers in Rajasthan and Gujarat. This diverts water away from the Ganges, a few kilometres from the India–Bangladesh border. The immense levels of construction along the river severely affected the flow of water downstream in Bangladesh. Stagnant reservoirs have led to high levels of toxic algae and bacteria that Bangladesh claims are now poisoning hundreds of thousands of people.
Destruction of ecosystems and livelihoods
In order to complete the western water-transfer route, China has also diverted water from the Lancang (Upper Mekong) River, and a series of 15 cascading dams has been completed. The 292-metre Xiaowan dam is now the world’s tallest, as high as the Eiffel Tower. The reservoir behind the dam has grown to 102 miles long. At the same time Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia have all been pursuing their equally destructive dam projects, violating international standards concerning both environmental and social issues. The Mekong River Commission dissolved in 2015, after failing to play any role in regional facilitation or to prevent dangerous dam-construction projects.
Dramatic changes to the river’s unique cycle of flood and drought – the annual flood pulse – have wrecked the delicate ecosystem of the region. In the waters of the Mekong that used to sustain the world’s second-largest inland fishery, most fish species are now threatened with extinction and the 60 million people who use the river as a source of food or livelihood are struggling for survival. Cambodia’s great central lake, Tonle Sap, the nursery of the lower Mekong’s fish stocks, used to fill up in monsoon season with a fifth of the Mekong’s waters. In 2025 it has become barely seasonal, and the loss of livelihood pushes another 15% of Cambodians below the poverty line and endangers many more.
On 7 September 2030, severe monsoon floods deluged 1.4 million hectares of land in the Mekong Delta, affecting 14.2 million people in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. The Vietnamese government’s ‘living with floods’ programme of the 2010s, to resettle people living in vulnerable zones, has failed due to lack of funding. Thus 5.3 million people in An Giang, Dong Thap and Tien Giang provinces have been driven out of the Mekong and the Red River Deltas. Climate refugees have swelled the population of Ho Chi Minh City, and Cambodia attempted to shut its borders in panic.
As regional dialogue reached a deadlock over dam building, there are no regional mechanisms in place to cope with a humanitarian disaster of this massive scale. Moreover, hugely expensive construction of dams and reinforcement of thousands of miles of dikes built after the Commission collapsed in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam will exacerbate the disaster in its aftermath. Barriers inhibit the self-cleansing mechanism of rivers and trap millions of cubic yards of industrial waste, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of industrial rubbish, and millions of tonnes of pesticides and fertiliser from fish and shrimp farms. The livelihoods and lives of the approximately 30 million inhabitants of the Mekong Delta are under long-term threat.

Why are the Tibetans not invited?

It seems to me that we are still living in the 19th century when the British could negotiate and sign treaties about Tibet without the participation of the Tibetans. 
Remember 1890, 1893, 1906, 1907  and then the infamous Panchsheel Agreement in April 1954. Why are the Tibetans are never invited to discuss their own fate, their own future?
Colonialist China probably think: 'It is not their business!' 
As the 21st Tibetan Task Force for Negotiations is meeting in Dharamsala, it should be the first topic on the agenda: a Tibetan participation to all conferences/study groups/seminars on the ecological future of the Tibetan plateau. 
Are we still living in the 19th century? What is the point to speak about 'autonomy' today, if the Tibetans are not even invited to discuss their future?

Int'l scientists to launch environmental studies on "Third Pole"
Xinhua, March 9, 2010
International scientists are preparing to launch a joint study on the environment of the "Third Pole" region centered on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and neighboring areas, a Chinese scientist said Monday.
Like the South and North Poles, environmental changes in the "Third Pole" has attracted increasing worldwide attention against the backdrop of concerns over global climate change, said Yao Tandong, director of the Institute of Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Research with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The "Third Pole" region, covering more than 5 million square km at an average altitude of above 4,000 meters, is the birthplace of about 1,000 glaciers in tropical and sub-tropical regions, Yao said.
"The environmental changes in the 'Third Pole' will directly affect the economic and social development in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and neighboring countries, and will directly or indirectly affect the livelihoods and even survival of the 1.5 billion residents there," he told Xinhua in an exclusive interview.
Yao, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), made the remarks while attending the ongoing annual session of the country's top political advisory body.
"Due to the global climate change, the 'Third Pole' is experiencing sensitive and marked changes, such as in cryosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere, which are exerting an influence on the social and economic development in the region," he said.
Under the "Third Pole Environment" (TPE) project initiated by Chinese scientists, a group of scientists and science organizations from countries in the region and western countries will gather to carry out joint studies focusing on the competing influences of water, ice, air, ecosystem and human activities in the region, Yao said.
"We hope to reveal the process and mechanism of environmental changes in the 'Third Pole' region, its response mechanism to global climate change, especially the monsoon system, improve the adaptation ability of human-kind for climate change, and help achieve harmonious development between human-kind and nature," he said.
Chinese scientists have conducted studies on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau for decades, and will further improve their research methods to expand their studies to the "Third Pole" region, Yao said.
During the interview, Yao also offered some negative forecasts for the plateau region due to climate change and human activities.
It is expected that the glaciers in China, located mainly on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, would shrink by more than 45 percent in area by 2100, he said.
"In developing glacier tourism, we must protect the environment," he said.
In addition, the area of frozen earth on the plateau would decrease by about 8.8 percent 50 years later and would diminish "drastically" within the next century, he said.
"That will endanger the safety of the highways and railway on the plateau," he warned.
He proposed that the central government continue funding major highway and railway projects to eliminate hidden dangers in roadbeds on top of the frozen earth layer in a bid to ensure the coordinated development of society, economy and the ecosystem in Tibet.