September 2014
When my colleague James West and I traveled to China last September, it didn't take long to see the toll of the country's coal addiction: James had a burning cough by our second day. On a bullet train from Beijing to Xi'an (roughly the distance between San Francisco and Phoenix), we whizzed along at 150 miles per hour through some of China's most polluted pockets, including the northeastern city of Shijiazhuang, where the smog registers at emergency levels for a third of the year—twice as often as in Beijing. A thick miasma hung heavy, clinging so low to fields of corn that it was hard to see where the earth met the dark, gray sky. Every few minutes we passed another giant coal-fired power plant, its chimneys spewing a continual billow of thick, white smoke.
By the time of our trip, villagers living near fracking wells had already complained about the deafening noise of drilling machinery, the smell of gas fumes, and strange substances in their water. One night last April, in a small southwestern town called Jiaoshi, an explosion at a shale gas drilling rig rattled residents awake, triggering a huge fire and reportedly killing eight workers. In the wake of the accident, an official from the Ministry of Environmental Protection said, "The areas where shale gas is abundant in China are already ecologically fragile, crowded, and have sensitive groundwater. The impact cannot yet be estimated."
Written by Jaeah Lee; produced with James West; video editing by James West
Mother Jones's Jaeah Lee and Climate Desk's James West traveled to central China and uncovered alarming trends in China's rush to frack-with global consequences-in this five-part video series.
In this second part of our video series, go behind-the-scenes of a top level meeting between US and Chinese officials in the city of Xi'an, as the conversation turns to fracking China's massive shale reserves. The guests at the compound here are gearing up for a push to export the United States' fracking boom to China-and beyond.
Constituting a whopping 70 percent of China's energy supply, coal has allowed the country to become the world's second-largest economy in just a few decades. But burning coal has also caused irreparable damage to the environment and the health of China's citizens. It's a crisis. And something has to change.
Just as fracking technology has crossed over from the fields of Pennsylvania and Texas to the mountains of Sichuan, so have the questions about its risks and consequences. If fracking regulations in the United States are too weak, then in China the rules are practically nonexistent.