December 5, 2025

Category: Water-Energy Choke Point

Outside Shenyang Lessons in Rice, Water, and Farming

by Keith Schneider0

SHENYANG, China — The rice paddies start immediately beyond the borders of Liaoning’s provincial capital, a growing city of 8.1 million residents. Like a whirling turbine, the city flings 10-lane boulevards and 30-story apartment towers ever farther into the countryside. I’m out tracking down new irrigation systems, part of my research on Chinese grain production for Circle of Blue. Finding the rice and evidence of China’s new investment in modern irrigation infrastructure is a 50-minute …

Read More

The U.S. Energy Boom and Ohio in The New York Times

by Keith Schneider2

My interest in the Ohio River Valley, as readers of ModeShift well know, is keen. Today, the New York Times published my latest piece about the billions being invested in mineral leasing for oil and gas drilling. Tomorrow, in the NYT Business section, is another piece I did on Cincinnati’s improved economy and surging riverfront development. You may recall this article on Owensboro Kentucky’s improved prospects for the NYT late last year. I did this …

Read More

Production, Water Savings, and a Heroic History on China’s State-Owned Farms

by Keith Schneider0

HONGXINGLONG, China — When she was a very young woman Liang Jun was one of the tens of thousands of durable adults dispatched by China’s new Communist Central Government in the early 1950s with orders to break open the prairie of this cold and formidable northeast province. Until agronomists and engineers from the Soviet Union offered their assistance, and their steel-tracked grey tractors, the work of cutting open land that was bound together by the …

Read More

North Dakota’s Oil Boom Leads U.S. Out of Recession

by Keith Schneider1

Sunday evening, December 2011, Amtrak’s eastbound Empire Builder pulls into Williston, North Dakota, a fast-growing northern Great Plains city riding the lashing tail of an oil-drilling dragon. A crowd gathers on the station platform. Men coming. Men going. Big pickups rumble in the parking lot. Four years into a drilling frenzy that has pushed North Dakota to the top of the nation’s oil-producing states, the sound of Williston is diesel engines. The scent is diesel …

Read More

Demand for Energy Tests Water Supply and Economic Stability in China and the U.S.

by Keith Schneider0

As you know, if you’re a regular reader of ModeShift, my interest for over a year has focused on energy demand and water supply in the United States and China. I study the trends and don’t see how advancing the fossil fuel agenda in both countries really helps provide long-term security. It just looks like we’re determined to make the energy industry richer and more influential,  while we do our best as ordinary citizens to …

Read More

Job One In U.S. and China: Perpetuate The Fossil Fuel Economy

by Keith Schneider0

Jay Letto, a friend who oversees the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists, wrote to me last week asking for my ideas and participation on a panel in October that looks at U.S. and China clean energy and environmental technology development. Here’s my response: The last year of reporting on energy and environment issues globally has been just about as interesting and engaging as any I’ve done — the China experience in particular. …

Read More

Bohai Sea Pipeline Could Open China’s Northern Coal Fields

by Keith Schneider0

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 …

Read More

In U.S. Big Ideas Prompt Big “No!” In China, It’s The Opposite

by Keith Schneider0

In an era of economic turmoil that has produced massive unemployment, accelerated industrial decline, and sowed fear and doubt across much of North America and Europe, China last week offered a much different lesson on growth and development. In the latest draft of its new 12th Five-Year Plan to manage the world’s fastest growing industrial economy, China’s leadership called for restraining the runaway growth that is raising the incomes of more than 400 million people, …

Read More

New Wind and Solar Sectors Won’t Solve China’s Water Scarcity

by Keith Schneider0

JIUQUAN, China-Business for wind and solar energy components has been so brisk in Gansu Province-a bone-bleaching sweep of gusty desert and sun-washed mountains in China’s northern region-that the New Energy Equipment Manufacturing Industry base, which employs 20,000 people, is a 24/7 operation. Just two years old, the expansive industrial manufacturing zone-located outside this ancient Silk Road city of 1 million-turns out turbines, blades, towers, controllers, software, and dozens of other components for a provincial wind …

Read More

Choke Point: China

by Keith Schneider1

Circle of Blue, the Traverse City-based global news and science organization, where I serve as senior editor, last week opened a compelling new series on the commanding threat to China’s modernization posed by water scarcity. Choke Point: China is the product of more than a month of reporting by four teams of writers and photographers that spent most of December 2010 in China. The first article prompted a nice flurry of good responses including a …

Read More