Posted by
Ed Lilly on Wednesday, July 02, 2008 8:58:36 AM
From Bloomberg.com:
Olympic organizers struggling to stem an algae bloom at the sailing venue in Qingdao are turning to another threat: a plague of locusts heading for Beijing.
Uh oh. But, the Olympics being such a hugely important event, and with the eyes of the world watching, surely the ChiComs will find a way to deal with the algae bloom and locusts using organic, earth-friendly techniques, right? And if they don’t, the environmentalists will be in an uproar, right?
Well....
The northern Chinese province of Inner Mongolia has mobilized 33,000 people to repel swarms of locusts
Sounds good so far. Use superior human resources to somehow “repel” the swarms. But let’s see, the story tells us that the locusts:
have infested an area of 1.3 million hectares (5,000 square miles)
Hmmm. Each of the 33,000 Chinese will somehow “repel” the locusts from an approximately 6.5 square mile area? I wonder how they’ll do that. Oh:
Locusts in full flight may not be so easy to tackle. Inner Mongolia authorities are using 200 tons of pesticides, 100,000 sprayers and four airplanes to kill the pests...
Let’s just hope that’s 200 tons of hemp-based, organic, earth-friendly pesticides sprayed by solar or bio-diesel powered, zero emission airplanes.
Perhaps there’s better news on the algae front:
The locust alert comes as 10,000 workers scoop up blue- green algae along the coast...
Sounds earth-friendly, again using immense man-hours to somehow scoop up the algae. And they’ve already had some reported success:
About 4,000 troops are helping the Qingdao clean-up, which has removed 150,000 tons of algae since June 25...
Wow. That's a lot of tonnage to remove in a week's time using environmentally friendly techniques. But I'm sure the ChiComs have been environmentally responsible. Best of luck in their continuing cleanup and preparation for the Games.