April 21, 2026

In China’s Coal Belt, A Refinery Drains Water and Life

by Keith Schneider0

Qingwei Sun, former Greenpeace campaigner, and lead author of Thirsty Coal, a two-part report on the rising water demands of China’s largest energy sector. Photo/Keith Schneider BEIJING — Qingwei Sun, who investigated and wrote two revealing reports for Greenpeace in the last two years on how China’s giant coal sector uses, and in some cases abuses the nation’s water reserves, is a 36-year-old geographer from Lanzhou, the capital and largest city in Gansu Province. At …

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Dust, Development, Determination in Mongolia

by Keith Schneider1

The levee road, one lane of dirt and stones, is the fastest way from the airport to downtown in traffic-snarled Ulan Bator, Mongolia’s furiously developing capital. Photo/Keith Schneider ULAN BATOR — A hard rock and coal mining boom that really got rolling about a decade ago is literally leaving Mongolia’s capital in the dust. It’s also yielded 1) an aged Communist-era airport that is too small for the rapid rise in passenger traffic, and 2) …

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In China, Responding to Water-Energy Choke Point Now a Government Priority

by Keith Schneider2

Jennifer Turner (in red), director of the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum, introduces the Water and Energy Team to policy experts at China’s Development Research Center of the State Council, the government research group that provides policy recommendations to China’s highest executive agency. Photo/Keith Schneider BEIJING — Almost three years ago a team of reporters and photographers from Circle of Blue, assisted by Jennifer Turner and her staff at the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum, …

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Back in Beijing

by Keith Schneider1

Beijing in summer is hot and a bit less polluted than in winter. Here at Tsinghua University. Photo/Keith Schneider BEIJING — On a hot morning here in China’s capital, the air is grey and the sky dark with pollution. It’s my seventh trip to China and the evidence of industrial overreach is so readily apparent. I’m here to participate in a speaking and convening event organized by Jennifer Turner, my colleague and director of the …

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Buffalo’s Comeback in the New York Times

by Keith Schneider1

BUFFALO – In 2002, when he was recruited to help turn 120 acres of this city’s underperforming downtown into a jobs-producing, world-class campus for medical research, education, and clinical care, Matt Enstice was among a select few of the city’s young professionals who was convinced the idea wasn’t a joke. Mr Enstice knows jokes. Prior to returning home and becoming the president and chief executive of the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, Inc., the non-profit group …

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Frankfort, Michigan’s July 4: Fireworks and A Legacy of Jewish Discrimination

by Keith Schneider0

FRANKFORT, MI – The public event of the year in Benzie County, Michigan occurs here on July 4. The day begins with a parade on Main Street, continues with an art fair, a carnival, and this year a sand castle design contest on the Lake Michigan beachfront. Thousands of people roll into town while the sun is high. And as it sets thousands more come for the meteoric spectacle – the fireworks show that lights …

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In New York Times: Akron Rubs Off Some Rust

by Keith Schneider1

AKRON, OH. – Until LeBron James became this city’s signature global brand, that honor belonged to the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.  The world’s third largest tire manufacturer, with $21 billion in sales revenue last year, was founded here in 1898 and stayed put even as B.F. Goodrich, Firestone, and General Tire, its biggest competitors, closed their Akron plants and left in the 1980s. In a word, Goodyear and Mr. James, who was born and …

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Consequence of Free Energy, Free Water in India is Huge Waste

by Keith Schneider2

NAWANSHAR, Punjab, India – On the way to Mandeep Sekhon’s wheat and rice farm, a 8-hectare (20-acre) expanse of irrigated paddies, the road swings past continuous fields of winter wheat, the first shoots of green peeking from the stubble of last summer’s rice. Early on a December afternoon, 32-year-old Sekhon displays the principal source of India’s farm plenty and its illogic – two streams of pure water that pour from the mouths of his farm’s …

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Owensboro’s ROMP Bluegrass Festival: “The Best In Any Real Radius.”

by Keith Schneider14

OWENSBORO, KY — When Gabrielle Gray was recruited ten years ago from Somerset, KY to direct the International Bluegrass Music Museum here, and to found an annual bluegrass music festival, this was a comfortable southern city stuck in a mid-American mustiness, a city in need of a fresh scrub. Two hours downriver from Louisville, Owensboro’s populous, 54,000 residents in 2000, was barely growing. Its downtown largely consisted of parking lots and empty turn of the 20th …

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India’s Economy Slowed, Environment Wrecked By Energy-Water-Food Choke Point

by Keith Schneider0

For a month at the end of 2012, I joined J. Carl Ganter, the director of Circle of Blue and a top American photojournalist, and Aubrey Parker, Circle of Blue’s young and exacting news editor, on an absorbing fact-gathering trip to India.  Our work focused on understanding the consequences of the contest between rising demand for energy and grain, and diminishing supplies of fresh water in a nation of 1.2 billion people. The first of …

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