Dam is ever finished, however,experts say hydropower will account for no morethan 20 percent of China’s electricity generated byyear 2010 (Burton 1994). That leaves no wayaround a heavy dependence on coal, used widelynot only to fuel China’s industrial boom, but also toheat homes for a population growing by 15 millionpeople a year. Forecasts indicate that China’s emissions of carbon dioxide will increase from approximately 2.8 billion tons in 1993 to 5.5 billion tons in 2020 (China Looks At 1996). Experts say that the best China can hope for is to cut coal’s portion of the energy mix from 75 to 60 percent by the year 2010 (Burton 1994). Even if China was able to improve its large electric power plants, it would not touch the needs of small industrial plants and millions of households for coal. China’s most pressing need is therefore to find cleaner, more efficient ways to burn the fossil fuel, reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, sulfur compounds, and the incompletely combusted particles that form soot. Domestic opposition to the dam has centered largely on the poor record of China’s Ministry of Water Resources, which includes the collapse of 62 dams in the Henan province in 1975 because of poor engineering and design. The resulting torrents of water wiped out whole cities and took the lives of an estimated 150,000 people (Sullivan 1995). Over 10 million contracted diseases and suffered starvation before the area could be restored and, because the Chinese government never acknowledged the disaster, it was not raised in hearings on the Three Gorges project (Topping 1995). Anti-dam lobbyists have been calling for an investigation of the Three Gorges construction plans and pushing for more government accountability with the hope of averting the resulting catastrophe if the 36 billion cubic yards of water to be dammed were ever to be released, either due to structural failure or an act of war. Scienti...
