China's worst fuel crunch in years has led a crematorium to dump half-burnt corpses to try to save on diesel costs, a Hong Kong newspaper has said.
Villagers in Hengyang county, in the southern province of Hunan, discovered the practice when an "unbearable stench" started coming from the site, and tried to block a road on Wednesday to stop funeral vehicles from delivering more bodies.
The village sent people to investigate the smell and the South China Morning Post said they saw "crematorium workers putting half-burnt human remains and organs in plastic bags and throwing them into a nearby ditch".
"As the price of diesel rose, we saw more and more bags thrown out from the crematorium," the paper quoted Xiao Gaoyi, a village representative and one of the witnesses, as saying.
China was hit by its worst fuel supply crisis in four years from October to November, as a widening gap between low, state-regulated domestic prices and market-driven international prices forced Chinese refiners to cut output.
Saturday, December 08, 2007
Bring Out Your Dead
The award for the most ghastly peak oil related story I've seen in some time goes to this one from the ABC about fuel shortages in China - "Crematorium 'dumped half-burnt corpses to save fuel'".
But, I'm not dead yet.
ReplyDelete'Ere. He says he's not dead!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R91L7LhH-wg
'Ere, hav some 'roo
ReplyDelete"While some kangaroo farmers are hoping the world will switch over to ‘roo sausages (and sweaters?), scientists like Athol Klieve, a Queensland research scientist, are trying to isolate those bacteria and move them into cow stomachs. This would make cows produce less methane AND harness more of the energy from the food they eat! While this might be a few years down the research track, the new reports from Queensland are generating a lot of excitement (not to mention flatulence jokes)." http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2007/12/09/dont-have-a-cow-but-australias-got-another-solution/