Enforced power cuts hobbling China’s big firms

Chinese steel mills and mobile phone factories are being idled and thousands of homes in one area are doing without electricity as local governments order power cuts to meet energy-saving targets set by Beijing.

Rolling blackouts and enforced power cuts are affecting key industrial areas. The prosperous eastern city of Taizhou has turned off street lights and ordered hotels and shopping malls to cut power use. In Anping County, southwest of Beijing, an area known as China’s wire-manufacturing capital, thousands of factories and homes have endured day-long blackouts over the past two weeks.
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“At home, we can’t use the toilet” on blackout days because of a lack of power for water pumps, Han said.
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“You could say local governments are trying to blackmail the central government: If you order me to do something I can’t deliver, I will pass on the pressure to ordinary people,” said Yang Ailun (楊愛倫), a spokeswoman for Greenpeace China.

Greens wants their McCain back - POLITICO.com Print View

Over the years, Sen. John McCain has been known to change his views every now and then. Environmentalists hope this is one of those times.
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Multiple sources said McCain reassured them in private that he still believed in the climate issue. But he said he wouldn’t be at the front of the pack if Obama didn’t take the lead himself. And that meant staying on the sidelines even as two of his closest Senate friends, Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), struggled to find consensus.
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Myron Ebell, a skeptic on climate science, predicts McCain will dabble in other issues sure to upset the right — just not global warming.

“Now that Sen. McCain has won the primary election by pretending to be a solid conservative, I expect he will return to type and find a fashionable liberal cause or two to promote and thereby gain the approbation of the establishment and particularly of the mainstream media,” Ebell said. “However, I doubt that one of those causes will be global warming. That’s because cap and trade has passed its sell-by date. Energy-rationing policies are dead for the next Congress. Sen. McCain will pick something that’s trendy rather than beating a dead horse.”