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Forward vs. Backwards

In the 2000 martial arts love story feature epic extravaganza Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the bandit/thief character Lo steals Yu Jialong’s comb during a raid, later letting her chasing him to a desert cave and across western deserts of Xinjiang where they eventually fall in love and then some. It’s great film for many other reasons that those but the point is, the film allowed us to see vast open spaces north of Tibet, in proximity to high-altitude plateau in the Qinghai region that China is now covering with renewable energy projects, and ‘covering’ is hardly a cromulent descriptor:

China’s clean energy efforts contrast with the ambitions of the United States under the Trump administration, which is using its diplomatic and economic muscle to pressure other countries to buy more American gas, oil and coal. China is investing in cheaper solar and wind technology, along with batteries and electric vehicles, with the aim of becoming the world’s supplier of renewable energy and the products that rely on it.
The main group of solar farms, known as the Talatan Solar Park, dwarfs every other cluster of solar farms in the world. It covers 162 square miles in Gonghe County, an alpine desert in sparsely inhabited Qinghai, a province in western China.
No other country on the planet is using high altitudes for solar, wind and hydropower on a scale as great as China’s on the Tibetan Plateau. The effort is a case study of how China has come to dominate the future of clean energy. With the help of substantial government-directed investment and planning, electricity companies are weaning the country off imported oil, natural gas and coal — a national priority.
Renewable energy helps China power 30,000 miles of high-speed train routes and its growing fleet of electric cars. At the same time, cheap electricity enables China to manufacture even more solar panels, which dominate global markets and power artificial intelligence data centers.
Electricity from solar and wind power in Qinghai, which occupies the northern third of the Tibetan Plateau, costs about 40 percent less than coal-fired power. Qinghai encompasses most of a region known among Tibetans as Amdo and includes the birthplace of the current Dalai Lama, now in exile.
Times link, and I’ll only add the article is predicated on ‘why’ China is doing this. And I do wonder why regarding a couple of things, but not that.
Image: NYT video
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Green Idolatry

It’s really American Idolatry, but we wouldn’t like it if anyone called it that. The two words almost meld into one with this phenomenon, a little too close for comfort, not quite close enough to be called a definitive rendering. In a phrase, just the way we like it.

It’s ostensibly just TV criticism, but you have to really squint not to see the Darwinian parallels to our shallow, wasteful nature.

But it isn’t necessary to seek deeper meaning in the finale; it’s the “American Idol” franchise itself that best speaks to the state of the nation.

“American Idol” matters not just as a pop culture phenomenon, but as an institution that works — with scary efficiency — at a time when so many other American enterprises seem flawed or imperiled. It stands out this season in particular: “American Idol” is a money-making machine in the middle of a worldwide recession, an old-fashioned must-see television hit at a time when the Internet and cable have eaten away at the networks’ hegemony.

Equal parts commercialized excess and live TV so scripted even its delayed gratification drips in perfect, pre-measured droplets, each constituent part supplies just a little more sadness than the last in a perfectly conceived formula ordained to guarantee the success of the whole. This is the sort of relentlessness that we can respect and believe in, even as it’s weighed down by self-knowledge that’s as loathsome and desperate as the pursuit of fame and fortune itself.

As a commodity, we eat fun and humiliation for breakfast, but not before we slap a corporate logo on them.