Image (source here) is of a section of the Yarlung Zangbo river, which forms the deepest canyon on the planet.
The idea of doing any sort of general preamble for China is a little absurd given how ubiquitous they are in economics and politics, so I'm just going to hop right in to a recent news item of interest: China is working on the construction of an enormous new hydropower project in Tibet (@Metabola@hexbear.net had brought this up just before the last news mega ended).
This project (consisting of, I believe, five dams) will be overall three times larger than the Three Gorges Dam, will cost $167 billion, and will supply 70 GW (by itself more power than several significant countries generate). There are, of course, meaningful concerns regarding concerning environmental damage, but helping to avert catastrophic climate change seems worth it. The news coming out of the clean energy sector of China has getting only more encouraging over the last few years, even as the fully neoliberalized Europe and America descend into climate skepticism and refuse to adequately fund projects that could avert the worst of climate change.
Geopolitically, given recent India-China tensions (for example, sending Pakistan the equipment to shoot down Indian jets, as well as run-of-the-mill border tensions) one expects India to not receive the news very well, as the river upon which the dam is being constructed proceeds to flow into Arunachal Pradesh. But from what I understand of the Indian hydrological situation (which is, admittedly, not much), I don't think enough of the water in India comes from the river for China to hypothetically cause any kind of water shortages in India - the monsoons seem to supply plenty of freshwater all by themselves. Nonetheless, as with all Chinese news, wild fearmongering abounds.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
On that dam, interesting that the power generated is mostly for export:
I struggle with this idea a bit. Triple the capacity of three gorges is a huge amount of power. Is that all supposed to be sold to India? What kind of transmission capacity is there in the area? It seems way more likely that most of the power would be sent to china's west.
Also, as for environmental impacts, I bet with 5 sequential dams that the water will get heated up as it goes through all the turbines. Would that actually matter? Idk but that's a lot of electricity generated so also a lot of heat.
The below article has a bit more info about the style and structure of this system - its run of river and doesn't involve big dams, so there would be pretty minimal impact on water flows. The article also notes that the vast majority of the water in downstream rivers in India comes from catchment in India, so water weaponization is not very possible
https://indianewengland.com/india-maintains-water-advantage-despite-chinas-brahmaputra-dam-push/
Modern turbines are quite efficient if they have access to a stator. Even if there was no dam, quite a lot of the energy would have been converted to heat along the river path
The calculation for potential energy is m•g•h, mass times gravitational force times height. At a height of 1000m, 1kg of water has a potential energy of roughly 10kJ (1•9.8•1000). 1 kcal is the amount of energy to heat up 1kg of water 1°C, and it's about 4000J. So, at best, dropping water 1km of height assuming 100% energy conversion to temperature, could heat it up by no more than 2.5°C (10.000/4000), so not that significant.
Regardless, the water in rivers flows downwards whether there's a dam or not, so that potential energy is converted into some other form of energy (sound, heat, soil erosion...). Changing from a natural fall to a dam would actually reduce the amount of energy going to those things since a big chunk of the potential energy is converted into electrical energy instead of heat, sound or erosion of soil. That's not a good thing per se, it's just a thing.
This is a very simplistic analysis, akin to assuming that the river water is a perfect sphere in a vacuum. Energy dissipation rate in the bypassed reach vs the hydroelectric generator system, changes in the natural flow regime of the bypassed reach which in turn affects sunlight penetration, speed of flow, and depth and position of any pondage associated with the electric generation (which most run of river projects still have even if they're smaller than reservoir dam hydroelectric) are important effects that are not considered in your envelope math.
Further, it's easy to say "oh its just a couple degrees at most" but one, it usually isn't because of the above factors, and two, fish and other aquatic life often take their lifecycle cues from temperature, among other things. I don't know what exactly lives in the watershed in question, but the lifecycle of cold water fish like salmon and salmonoids can be affected by even a half degree C change or so.
I see, your original comment specifically said heating up because of a lot of electricity generation, so I ignored the other factors like sunlight absorption.
My intent wasn't to say hydro doesn't have an environmental impact, which it does as do all energy sources, just to say that heating due to the fall of water itself can safely be neglected in calculations because it's falling either way, whether through hydro dam or river path.
Fair, I didn't write my first comment very well. I was thinking of not just the act of generating electricity, but that generating a lot of electricity requires moving a lot of water, which increases the relative importance of all those other factors.
I wonder what environmental assessment and international engagement/consultation looks like on a project like this in China. I'm familiar with Canadian and American processes but not Chinese or Indian.
China has done some cool stuff with UHV power distribution, they will probably pipe it to major cities