Chinese Water Torture?

Not exactly what you might think... but the website oilprice.com has an interesting piece about drought (humankind induced?) in China. This echoes my thinking every since I visited China twelve years ago, before the Three Gorges Dam was built. While it may be a good idea to build dams, the system should be less concentrated and managed more with the risks involved in mind. Instead, a top-down, "Central Committee knows best" strategy has been pursued, which ironically may have made China MORE not less vulnerable to drought and energy shortages. Read:

China's Hydroelectric Sector Crippled by Severe Drought

In one province, the article claims, a full 90% of power production has been crippled because of inadequate water levels in the reservoirs. So they have turned to generating power with extra coal burning! And there is a drinking water shortage. And in China, even in the best of times, there is a shortage of clean drinking water. Critics have charged that water has been discharged wastefully because it is required of dam operators to maximize power production. While I don't think that this drought will cause famine or chaos, at least not yet, it is indicative of the dangerous game of overproduction that is being played in China, in order to meet the demands of the West's overconsumption and the Chinese leadership's desire for growth to quell social unrest. Our global economic and yes, environmental system, in out of balance. Building more dams and producing more power in order to produce more goods to ship to the US, who will produce more debt which the Chinese will finance never was a sustainable economic model and the limits will soon be reached, if they have not been already. I am not against development. I am not saying that more dams should not be built and that more power should not be produced. I am saying that the system should be rationalized to produce maximum productivity. This will not be done with Beijing and Washington, DC pulling the levers to maintain global growth. It will happen when control is returned back to the local level. It will happen. It could happen now in a relatively orderly fashion, but I fear that the present madness will continue until power is forcibly wrested from the center violently or because the center collapses under the weight of its own folly. It is likely that we will see whether and how it will happen in the next two years.