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CHARLESTON, S.C. - Under powder blue skies in mid-March, a small crowd of local leaders gathered on Union Pier to formally announce a $2.4 million contract to design a new maritime gateway to this beautiful coastal city.

I lived in Charleston from February 1980 to September 1983, writing for The News and Courier, the local newspaper, and contributing as a freelance to Time Magazine, Southern Magazine, The New York Times, and other publications. Last month I returned to report for The New York Times, my favorite newspaper, on an intriguing dust-up over development, a classic Charleston dispute that encompasses the community’s insistent goal to achieve the most livable, beautiful, and prosperous place in America.

The winning assignment for the gateway, awarded to CH2M Hill, is to draw up plans that convert an empty 100,000-square-foot steel warehouse at the pier’s north end into a state-of-the-art $25 million cruise ship passenger terminal. The new facility replaces the existing 18,000-square-foot cinder block terminal, built in 1973, at the south end of the 67-acre Union Pier complex.

Scheduled to open in the fall of 2012, the new terminal is seen as an essential step in what the South Carolina State Ports Authority, the project’s developer, says will be a much larger demolition and mixed use development project that would divide the Union Pier complex in two. Twenty-two acres at the north end is reserved for the terminal and surface parking for cruise ship passengers. Some eight acres of pilings and concrete deck would be removed. And 35 acres of shoreline property with exquisite views of the harbor will be made available for private development.

“Our vision is to extend the city grid to the waterfront,” said Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., a 68-year-old Democrat first elected in 1975. “There will be a combination of public spaces, waterfront access, residential and commercial development. We have the conceptual plan. It’s the starting point for a new part of Charleston that begins along the water’s edge, and from there mixes uses in a low-rise 18^th and 19^th century scale city.”

But while Mr. Riley and port executives view the development as an opportunity to put an obsolete stretch of concrete to new uses, a group of influential opponents see a threat.

Their concerns center on precisely what the new terminal is supposed to achieve –  enhancing Charleston’s growing reputation as a destination and a home port for big cruise ships. This year the port anticipates 175,000 passengers from 90 cruises, up from 69 cruises and 111,000 passengers in 2010.

See the New York Times version here.

– Keith Schneider

YINCHUAN, China—The morning we travel north from this provincial capital, following the Yellow River to the Nan Liang Migration Farm, Kou Guojiang greets our arrival with a smile and a farm-fresh breakfast. It is April 13, and the bright sun lights a long table set with big purple grapes, miniature oranges, thin slices of watermelon, cherry tomatoes, and crisp red apples so cold they perspire in the warming air.

Kuo is the 46-year-old chairman of the Nan Liang farm’s water user association, which supplies Yellow River water to 300 farm families who irrigate and cultivate 200 hectares (494 acres) of corn and wheat. It is the 14th day of the Choke Point: China research and speaking tour, and the first visit by our five-person team to a rural area.

Kuo is gracious, clear-eyed, and not at all shy. He tells us that in 2003 the government relocated the association’s families from a very dry region in southern Ningxia, where crops frequently failed for lack of moisture.

Now he worries that similar conditions are unfolding on the Nan Liang farm, where persistently dry weather and competition from new coal-based industries have prompted government water managers to cut allotments to the association by 10 percent a year since 2008. Yet, despite the diminishing supplies of water and 53-year-old, unlined, water-wasting, sand-filled irrigation canals that transport it to their land, Kuo says harvests have increased.

He says that technical assistance from the World Bank and other institutions helped the association’s farmers to increase their harvests, even as they use 30 percent less water.

“If we had good canals, we’d be able to save even more water,” Kuo says.

Meeting Eager Audiences
Since mid-February, in probing weekly reports from our Choke Point: China series, Circle of Blue and the China Environment Forum of the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars have for the first time revealed the increasingly fierce competition between energy and water that threatens to upend China’s progress.

In late March, the two organizations arrived in Beijing for the start of a 16-day trip that took three reporters from Circle of Blue and two researchers from the China Environment Forum to Beijing and Shanghai in eastern China and then to Chengdu and Yinchuan, in the nation’s south and west. The tour, supported by the Energy Foundation and Vermont Law School, also included Adam Moser, the China Environment Fellow at Vermont Law School, who joined us at events in Beijing and Shanghai.

Much of our time was spent describing the project findings to gatherings of academics, business leaders, scientists, environmental NGO staffers, students and diplomats. Some groups—like the April 11 meeting with environmental leaders at the Conservation International office in Beijing—were small enough to fit around a conference table. The largest event was at Ningxia University, which was attended by 1,100 students and faculty members.

Read more here at Circle of Blue.

– Keith Schneider

CHENGDU, China — Just as with food safety trends in the United States, one antidote to the growing incidence of serious contamination events in China is to raise more food without farm chemicals using organic production practices.  On Tuesday this week I visited the Anlong Organic Farm about 40 miles west of Chengdu, in Sichuan Province, and one of China’s growing number of organic farms.

The farm is six years old, and owned and managed by nine families, several of whom migrated to this region of southwest China in the early 1960s. They collaborate to produce a wide assortment of green vegetables at this time of year, and later a number of varieties of fruit, few of which I recognized.

My party, which included Carl Ganter, the director of Circle of Blue, and Peter Marsters of the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow Wilson Center, watched six people harvest woshen, a leafy green with a thick stalk, that was neatly stacked like logs in the bed of a three-wheel motorized cart. They stood in a field no larger than the average American front lawn, patiently holding the heavy green in one hand and removing thick leaves from the stalk with a knife in the other. They finish by slicing the ragged leafy end to create a straight and neat cut.

The carefully choreographed harvest, five workers slicing woshen while a sixth hoisted full baskets and walked them out to the waiting cart, was a clear contrast to what’s occurring in China’s industrialized food sector. This month, Chinese authorities arrested two farmers in northern Gansu Province in the nation’s northwest region for deliberately poisoning milk with nitrite. The police, who closed two dairies, have not publicly disclosed a motive for the farmers’ crime, which killed three children and hospitalized 36 people.

Food safety scandals have become a regular part of the national news here since 2008 when six children died and 300,000 people were injured by milk powder poisoned by melamine, a dangerous and outlawed food additive. Other contamination events include pork products that contained clenbuterol, a growth hormone, and food produced with recycled cooking oil that contained toxic contaminants.

The agriculture sector also is among China’s major water polluters. Industrial farm practices that include ample use of growth-promoting fertilizers, weed killing herbicides, and insect-preventing organo-chlorine pesticides add to farmers’ expenses and result in runoff that pollutes the nation’s rivers and lakes.

There is no runoff from the Anlong farm. Farmers here told us the farm earns 15 cents for every stalk of woshen sold at the smaller regional markets, or twice the price for conventionally grown woshen. When they sell to the limited organic market in Chengdu, a city of 10 million residents, they earn 90 cents for each stalk. There were 1,400 woshen piled in the three-wheel cart by the time the harvest finished, a haul worth about $210.

While not wealthy, the organic farmers of Anlong told us that each family can earn as much as $1,500 a month producing and marketing chemical-free produce. In addition they operate a bed and breakfast and serve meals to the growing number of Chinese tourists who’ve heard about the enterprise and stop by to take a look.

We ate the farm’s delicious organic lunch and met Zhang Yifei, a former journalist who’s started a new NGO in Shanghai, Green Citizens, that’s considering building a local foods program. I suggested he call Patty Cantrell, a friend and colleague who recently left the Michigan Land Use Institute, where she established one of the country’s top local foods programs, to start her own consultancy, Regional Food Solutions. A little organic matchmaking 9,000 miles from home.

– Keith Schneider

Bob Dylan performed here on Friday night in a memorable concert that featured a number of famous songs including Tangled Up In Blue, Desolation Row, and Like a Rolling Stone. His raw voice grew sweeter as his vocal cords warmed, and in the latter stages he actually sounded alot like the younger Dylan we all know so well.

Though China has surpassed the United States in clean energy development, transportation, urban investment, residential housing, auto sales, and the raw fury of consumer culture, the Chinese display a stunning allegiance to American cultural icons. The same week that Dylan performed, in a concert criticized by Maureen Dowd for its sellout to Chinese authorities who prescribed his playlist, Disney announced the start of construction for a $4 billion theme park here, and the local Barbie store went out of business. A friend told me that’s because Barbie broke up with Ken some years back and their efforts at virtual doll culture reconciliation failed. 

As for the Dylan concert, I was delighted by the pacing, the fresh arrangements, the great band that backed him and thought not once that there was a political dimension to the show. Must be getting soft.

As for China, and this magnificent coastal city of some 20 million, let’s just say the joint is on a roll. Thirty years ago, Shanghai was less than half its current size. Cars numbered in the thousands. The local geography was distinguished by a few 19th century European buildings and a whole lot of one-story residences and shops. At that point China had a choice to make between pursuing a traditional agrarian development path or launching a program to catch up to the western energy-wasting, drive through, high-rise, mass consumer path to wealth generation.

Any visitor here clearly sees that China chose the latter, and pursued it at a scale and speed never before seen in human history. China is adding 2.5 billion square meters of office, retail, residential, and industrial construction every year to its landscape. By 2020, the country will have 17.5 billion square feet of buildings, more than any country. It will have essentially duplicated in a decade all of the building square footage that it took the United States a century to construct.

What’s either cute or disturbing is how devoted the Chinese are to American cultural signals, our music, our markers, the things and people that entertain us and describe our way of life. Lady Gaga is big here and so, to some extent, is Bob Dylan. Disney’s new theme park is bound to be a smash. And Barbie? They closed the Shanghai store but she’s still around too.

– Keith Schneider

SHANGHAI, China – Cascades of light, like shimmering waterfalls, tumble down the sides of spiral skyscrapers here in what a friend described as China’s blade runner city. Highways are elevated, lit underneath at night in blacklight blue. A maglev train, the first in the world, speeds at 250 miles per hour to the glass and steel expanse of the international airport, which gathers the train in the folds of its white wings.

It’s easy as a westerner raised at the height of the 20^th century American empire to get carried away with the spectacle that is China in the 21^st. Shanghai’s riverfront Bund is an apt place to start.

San Francisco’s Embarcadero or Boston’s Faneuil Hall, or Chicago’s Navy Pier are engaging public spaces, night or day. None, though, is nearly as beautiful, exciting, and well designed as the Bund, the grandest example of public space architecture – matching the urban experience with a natural resource — that I’ve ever seen.

Nineteenth century European-built government buildings, lit beautifully to enhance the ornate stone curls and cornices, face towers that reach to the clouds. Between them is the heavy boat traffic of the Huangpu river. A number of the office towers serve as screens for full-color videos and motion graphic displays, so colorful and bright they light the barges and river boats. Tens of thousands of residents and tourists stroll the granite-tiled plaza along a mile of the river’s western shore. At the southern end an  80-year-old steel truss bridge, lit in red, beckons brides and stunning Chinese models and their eager photographers.

Chinese, like Americans, gather at the water’s edge. Here, though, the scent in the sea air and the energy in the crowds is different. More hopeful. More confident. More secure. China is a nation that knows where it wants to go. The U.S. is a nation anxious to hold on to where it’s already been. Every American I’ve met in China, most of them young, ambitious, and seeking a place in an economy here that grows 10 percent a year, asks the same questions. Why is the U.S. so stuck? Why haven’t Americans responded to the way China is opening so much new opportunity in so many of its industrial sectors? What is wrong with America?

There is no one answer, of course. But it’s also perfectly clear that the cultural and economic power displayed at the Bund, (see pix below by J. Carl Ganter) the technological and financial might described by the maglev and the Shanghai airport, portray a nation that is content with America’s diminished stature. China is setting its own fearless course, just like the United States once did.

– Keith Schneider

XI’AN, China—Last November, as government leaders considered energy goals for China’s upcoming 12th Five-Year Plan—which was adopted last month—60-year-old geographer Huo Youguang took the podium at an academic meeting about water scarcity and coal production in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, one of the driest inhabited areas on the planet.

Over the next half-hour or so, Huo described a first-of-its-kind transcontinental pipeline that he believed could be a breakthrough in developing more fossil energy from Xinjiang and China’s other northern coal-rich provinces, while conserving the region’s scarce freshwater reserves.

His proposal: drop a pipe into the Bohai Sea in China’s east, draw more than 340,000 cubic meters (90 million gallons) of seawater a day into a complex of coastal desalination plants, and then pump this water 1,400 meters uphill for more than 600 kilometers (nearly 400 miles) to Xilinhot, where it will be used for coal mining operations.

The Bohai Pipeline reflects the urgency of China’s confrontation with its diminishing freshwater resources.  It also represents the country’s daring and tenacity in solving big problems, a quality that is weak in the U.S. I know. Human rights, environmental degradation, over population, lousy toilets, slow Internet. These also describe China. But there’s no mistaking  China’s resolve to succeed, and the fact that it’s produced rising incomes and opportunity for 400 million citizens. In the U.S., the middle class is under seige and incomes for almost everybody but the wealthiest have been falling for over a decade.

Xilinhot, an Inner Mongolia city of 177,000, is the destination for the Bohai Pipeline. It lies atop a mammoth and, so far, untouchable coal reserve. Chinese authorities estimate Xilinhot’s proven and unproven coal reserves to contain 1.4 trillion metric tons. At China’s current rate of coal consumption—more than 3 billion metric tons annually—the Xilinhot reserves alone could power the country for the next 425 years.

If the first $US 6 billion stretch of the Bohai Pipeline were to perform as Huo anticipates, it could be expanded and sent an additional 2,800 kilometers (1,850 miles) from Xilinhot—crossing the rest of Inner Mongolia and through northern Gansu Province—all the way to the western province of Xinjiang, where Chinese geologists say even larger coal reserves exist. Leaders are pressing the region to double current coal production capacity to 200 million metric tons of coal per year by 2015.

By the time had Huo finished his presentation, he had ignited a national engineering debate surrounding the cost, practicality, and feasibility of using vast amounts of purified seawater to produce more coal for China’s modernization, while simultaneously easing northern China’s water shortage. By suggesting a giant project that some authorities considered daffy, Huo also confirmed just how vulnerable China’s powerful engine of growth is to deepening water scarcity, particularly in the energy-rich northern and western provinces, now the primary focus of China’s development and modernization.

Collision Approaches
As China rushes deeper into the second decade of the 21st century, the nation’s energy production and consumption trend is a steep, increasing line. It is that vector— fast-rising energy demand confronting water scarcity—that is proving so difficult to resolve.

Huo Youguang, a professor in the Center for Environment and Modern Agriculture Engineering at Xi’an Jiaotong University in Shanxi Province, is convinced a transcontinental pipeline will help.

Back in December, while I was reporting in China for Circle of Blue, Huo told me that the transformation of the growing and modern desert cities of Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Xinjiang, Ningxia, and Shanxi provinces are endangered by their diminishing freshwater reserves.

These regions contain the nation’s largest proven and unproven coal reserves. But developing coal reserves, along with the power and processing infrastructure to consume coal, uses tens of billions of gallons of water each year—water that isn’t available in a region that receives just a few inches of rain annually and where climate change is reducing snow pack.

We need water, and the sea can provide it,” Huo said, noting that he had first proposed an across-the-north route for a pipeline from the Bohai Sea back in 1997.

In 2002, a separate academic team from Beijing University proposed a similar route, but further to the north. However, both pipelines—which would transport water more than 3,400 kilometers (2,100 miles) to Xinjiang—are seen by a number of Chinese engineers as impractical.

And even if the pipeline were built, say critics, would it really be capable of slaking the big thirst of northern China’s coal sector?

Evading Water-Energy Choke Point, For Now
Of all the threats over the next decade to China’s rapid modernization, arguably none is more significant than assuring adequate supplies of coal, which accounts for 70 percent of the nation’s total energy production and consumption. In the previous chapters of Choke Point: China, Circle of Blue has reported the essential outlines of a potentially ruinous and fast-approaching confrontation between rising demand for coal and steadily diminishing freshwater reserves.

Read more here.

– Keith Schneider