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TRANSCRIPT
Lobsang Yangtso: We would just lie down and then, you know, drink directly from the river with your mouth, and then I have this memory because when I turned over that side, you know, I could see a horse drinking at the same time as well. [laughs] Yeah, I mean, I remember that part. Yeah, I mean, you can just you know lie down … and drink directly from the river. You are making me to miss my homeland. [laughs]
For the first twenty years of her life, Lobsang Yangtso lives in eastern Tibet. Then she leaves. Twenty-five years pass before she comes home again.
Lobsang Yangtso: But now, you know, everything has changed.
The Tibet she returns is not the Tibet she remembers.
The no mads gone from the hills where she’d watched them grazing. Instead fences cut across the landscape. CCTV towers overlook villages. And the river from her childhood?
Nobody drinks there anymore, Lobsang says.
But what she’s seeing in her hometown is part of something much bigger.
Around the world, countries are racing to cut carbon emissions – and demand is soaring for the resources needed to build a cleaner energy system.
No country is moving faster than China. It leads the world in building solar panels, wind farms, batteries and electric vehicles.
And much of what China needs is found on the Tibetan Plateau: rivers that feed some of Asia’s largest watersheds, along with copper, lithium and other critical minerals.
But this isn’t just a story about energy. It’s about land, culture and power – and who pays the price for progress.
I’m Neil King.
This is Living Planet.
Lobsang Yangtso: my homeland is one of the most beautiful places in Tibet. …
Today Lobsang Yangtso is an environmental researcher for International Tibet Network. As a kid, she ran through fields here, in high-altitude farmland surrounded by mountains. River gorges wind through the region. In the nineties, the mountainsides were dotted with slow-moving yaks, and semi-nomadic herders like Lobsang’s father.
Lobsang Yangtso: “…a few families would take all the yaks from all the households and then they go up on the mountain and then they come back. So it’s based on the rotation, and they move from place to place. So it’s like a very close way, supporting each other, living together and then especially during summer times, because of the high altitude, we get lots of you know the summer flowers…
Yellow poppies. Purple aster. White wild flowers that she can’t recall the name for.
Lobsang Yangtso: “…and people love to go for picnics, and it becomes community picnics. They love to keep horses in their houses as well. Tibet has lots of glaciers and streams and the small rivers are quite you know common.”
In the summer, the river was still cool, fed by snowmelt from soaring mountain peaks. And in the winter, when it froze over…
Lobsang Yangtso: “…then ice skating was quite popular, even though we don’t have a you know ice proper ice skating that we see, but … you would see small kids. You know, they have a small wooden chair or something like that, and then your friends pushing you, and then you’re just rowing.
We have this belief of believing in the sacred mountain and sacred rivers, and because we believe in deities … we believe that if we exploit or extract any of the resources, or create pollution in that area, because of the deities, you know there is a possibility that you get harmed by that.”
Lobsang left Tibet as a teenager. A monk from her village gave his blessing, and she was off to India for university. She didn’t know then that coming home would be so hard.
In the years that followed, the Chinese state imposed more and more restrictions on Tibet.
It took twenty-five years for Lobsang to get a visa to go home. Once she did, she wanted to lay eyes on the monastery she grew up worshipping in.
In the monastery, monks wore the same red robes. Police wore plain clothes.
Lobsang: “Even within the monastery, I could see a police station in the monastery.”
Law enforcement had entered the monastery. What had vanished were images of the Dalai Lama, the Buddhist spiritual leader who fled to India in the 1950s, only a few years after Tibet was formally incorporated into the People’s Republic of China.
It was not only the monasteries that had changed. So had the land.
Lobsang: “When I was coming inside from Tendu to my hometown, another really strange thing that I have seen is that the sand mining that they do along the rivers.”
Tibetan herders were reporting fish disappearing, and hundreds of yaks dying after drinking polluted water. Locals said the pollution was a brew of toxic chemicals, leaking from mines upstream. The state is digging for what some call the white gold of the green transition – lithium.
Lobsang: “The river that used to flow in just in front of my house, people don’t drink anymore.”
Many of Asia’s largest rivers originate in the Tibetan Plateau – that’s why this region is called the “Water Tower of Asia.” Downstream, an estimated two billion people rely on the flows that begin in this region.
But it’s not just freshwater that matters here. Today, the Tibetan Plateau is dotted with some of the highest saltwater lakes on Earth. And some of those lakes are reservoirs of liquid treasure: lithium, which we need for the batteries that are so crucial to the clean energy transition.
Meanwhile, locked into the rock of these mountains…
Copper and other materials mined here go into the solar panels that China produces so efficiently.
Some of the largest mines under Chinese state control are in Tibet, pumping out hundreds of thousands of tonnes of copper and other minerals each year.
But the mountains hold another prize for the clean energy transition … gravity.
Ruth Gamble: “The place with the most hydropower potential in Asia– well, actually the world, is the water falling off the sides of the east and the south of the Tibetan Plateau, so that’s where the dams have been concentrated in the last– since the since the end of the Three Gorges Dam in the last 25 years.
My name’s Ruth Gamble. I’m the director of La Trobe Asia and a senior lecturer in environmental history at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.”
Dams work by storing water… and then letting it drop. The force of that fall turns turbines, and their spinning generates electricity.
Ruth Gamble: “What you have like on the edges of the Tibetan plateau where the water just pachooos down That’s a technical term – pachooing [laughs] is where it just charges down off the side of the plateau – it’s the most potential energy, gross potential energy of any water on the planet because the descent is so steep, and the descent is so long, that it can it can create more turning turbines. It will turn more turbines than anywhere else on Earth.”
All that falling water makes Tibet one of the most promising places on Earth for hydropower. But…
Ruth Gamble: “Everything else wants to slide down there as well. So landslides and avalanches and outburst floods are all going to come charging down that side of the slope as well.”
The advocacy group International Campaign for Tibet counts more than 100 dams planned for Tibet that haven’t broken ground yet. They estimate these projects could displace more than a million people. But, they also estimate these dams would produce enough clean energy to electrify a country with the power footprint of Germany – so projects that could push a million people out of their homes could power tens of millions more with renewable energy.
Ruth Gamble: “It’s not just about whether you transition; it’s about how you transition, right?”
China is still the world’s largest carbon emitter, and it’s still building coal plants at a cracking pace. Yet its clean energy buildout is also the fastest in the world, by a wide margin. To wrap our heads around what might seem like a mess of contradictions, we have to get clear on what China really is.
David Fishman: “It’s an upper middle-income economy, right? It’s not a fully developed or industrialized economy.”
That’s David Fishman, principal consultant at the Lantau Group in Shanghai. The firm focuses on the Asian energy sector and clean energy transition in China.
David Fishman: “China is trying to decarbonize and grow at the same time. Which is not something most other developed economies have to think about.”
Fishman explains that China’s energy use is growing roughly 6% each year. For such a huge country, that means a massive amount of new power coming online. It’s equivalent to adding an entire Germany’s worth of energy every year. In 2025…
David Fishman: “…China added enough wind and solar and other clean energy sources so that it was able to meet 100% of incremental growth with its new clean energy sources.”
Even with all of this energy coming online, many Chinese households run without the kind of electrified lifestyles that the Global North is accustomed to. China’s energy stats may look huge, but a lot of that power is flowing directly into industrial operations. If you look at the household level…
David Fishman: “Are they still at what a development economist would call an equitable level of per capita energy consumption? And the answer is no. On a global developed economy basis, they’re not at that level.”
Making sure every household has enough affordable power for energy-hungry appliances like washing machines and microwaves is still a problem in China.
For Beijing, Fishman says, the founding premise isn’t how to decarbonize. It’s how to get more power in a stable, affordable way. Decarbonization layers on top.
Put another way: in Europe, decarbonization is the prize. In China, it’s secondary – yet the country has still built more renewable capacity, faster, than any democracy has managed. For anyone who wants a faster global transition, that raises an awkward question.
Fishman: “If you believe in the China mission, you are in some way kind of acknowledging or embracing the idea that, you know, benevolent authoritarianism is real and a valid way to organize the world, right? That you could have a good emperor or a good king, or a benevolent hegemon, and in this case, our political economic systems are really poorly equipped to deal with the challenge of the energy transition. And China has zero qualms. Chinese policymakers have zero qualms about intervening in the affairs of the market.”
While Europe continues to shut down coal plants, it struggles to incentivize the kind of clean tech production that we need to fill energy gaps. China can change almost overnight. It can impose province-level energy quotas, and mandate that solar panels are efficient enough.
David Fishman: “This is how you end up with just wildly different outcomes for what I think most people who are paying attention to what climate scientists are talking about agree is a socially desirable outcome.”
The same centralised system that can muscle industries into decarbonizing, can also easily push people out of their homelands to build mines, solar farms and dams.
Lobsang: “They care about you know their own ambitions of energy transition or … the so-called renewable energy, but at the expense of the Tibetan resources and at the expense of the Tibetan people’s life.”
In 2024, Tibetans protested against the proposed Kamtok dam. Footage leaked out to the rest of the world. One video, published by Radio Free Asia, shows police in black uniforms grabbing monks in their traditional red robes, shoving them sideways. A video obtained by BBC shows officials holding papers. Monks kneel before them, clasp their hands together like in prayer, and they cry.
The Kamtok dam is still in planning stages. But in 2026, the Chinese state broke ground on a much larger hydropower project, in an even more restricted area – the Tibet Autonomous Region.
The new project could produce 300 billion kilowatt hours of electricity each year – for scale, that’s how much power the United Kingdom consumed last year.
Environmentalists in China are concerned about the impact of such a massive construction project in such a fragile and unique landscape.
Lobsang Yangtso: “With the huge dam constructions that we see, once it destroys, it takes millions of years, and you know we don’t know how long it could take to restore the land.”
It doesn’t help that the Chinese state has so far refused to publish an Environmental Impact Assessment. The Chinese state says the project is good for everyone. A foreign ministry spokesperson said during a press conference in 2024 that the state spent decades developing the project, so it will have “no negative impact” downstream. The goal, she said, is to “speed up developing clean energy, and respond to climate change and extreme hydrological disasters.”
Ruth Gamble: “This is like Great Wall stuff, right? …What’s always really struck me is that in the last plan where they described the building of this dam, it came after going to the moon, developing new robotics for AI, deep sea exploration and mining, and then this, right? It was like, let’s push the envelope. It’s like a new frontier.”
The project makes use of the massive Great Bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo river high in the Himalayas.
Chinese ecologists and the Chinese conservation NGO Shanshui describe the canyon as a kind of gene bank for the planet – it’s home to an exceptional concentration of wildlife, including tigers, Tibetan brown bears, ancient forests, and the tallest tree in Asia.
Ruth Gamble: “The path that the Yarlung Tsangpo makes through the Eastern Himalaya is one of the most amazing geological, ecological, and hydrological phenomena on the planet, and I still can’t believe that people don’t know about it. Like it should be in textbooks.”
The river flows through a gorge that plunges down nearly 20,000 feet, or six kilometers. That’s three times deeper than the Grand Canyon. The river runs between twin peaks, then bends around a mountain, like a humongous horseshoe.
Ruth Gamble: “As it goes around in a U-turn, it drops really fast, and so it drops like a kilometer in 45 kilometers.”
Then, it joins with another river, which flows out of glaciated mountains.
Ruth Gamble: “…then the two rivers together drop down again another kilometer within 100 kilometers before they come around that bend.”
Along the way, the river has dropped through layers of wildly different terrains. The top of the gorge is alpine and blanketed in snow. And as it dives down, it becomes like a moisture suck, pulling up water from the Indian Ocean. The drop there is so steep that the land shifts from dry alpine to subtropical, and then tropical, all in one line of vision.
Ruth Gamble: “I’ve been there in jungles and stared up at glaciated peaks, right? You’re staring at snow and you’re sitting there like surrounded by banana plantations, going, “What? This is too hot!” Right? It’s very weird, weird, weird situation to be in.”
China’s plan is to bore massive holes through the mountain that the Yarlung Tsangpo wraps around. Water from the snowy high point of the horseshoe can shoot directly through the mountain, in tunnels, hitting a chain of underground power stations built into the rock, each one squeezing more electricity from the same water before it spits back out into the low point of the river’s tropical curve.
Gamble: “The most amazing thing I think biologically to explain how amazing this place is: in the mountains at the bottom, there’s Bengal tigers. They’re the main kind of big cat there. And then the next bit you go up, you have leopards, and then you have these cats that are called Asian golden cats that live in the middle bits. And then you’re up the top, you have snow leopards.”
But it’s not just cats living along this Great Bend. There are at least three distinct cultural and indigenous groups here, including Tibetan Buddhists.
Ruth Gamble: “I don’t think you can say oh this dam is going to do good because it’s going to reduce carbon. It depends on growth. It depends on how the energy is transmitted, what it’s used for, you know, is it used for dark factories with robots to produce more cars? I’m not sure if it’s used to like to charge up hospitals and schools and other things. Then that’s more of an argument.”
The Tibetan Central Administration points out that power generated by the Yarlung Tsangpo project will largely bypass Tibet. Experts, including authors of the ecological report we mentioned earlier, say that the power will flow to Eastern China.
But the state has promised that the dam construction and operation will boost local Tibetans’ “livelihoods and prosperity” by creating new jobs.
For the much smaller Kamtok dam – the one that could flood monasteries – China has promised compensation for Tibetans who will be relocated, though we couldn’t find specific figures. We reached the Chinese state for this report but did not get a response.
China expects the Yarlung Tsangpo project will be operational by 2033. By 2035, China plans to have doubled its non-fossil energy supply. By 2060, carbon neutrality.
Lobsang Yangtso: “Wherever the states are planning to build, for me, the core of the question is whether the local people are consulted or not, whether they have been informed or not, whether the environment impact assessment assessment has been carried forward or not. So that, and then finally who gets the benefit of this big infrastructure development?”
Right before Lobsang left Tibet as teen, she was with family members on horseback, riding from monastery to monastery in the hills to get the blessing of local lamas.
When she returned, she traveled by car, on smooth roads newly built by the Chinese state. She watched covered trucks pass by, not knowing what spoils were inside, and what she saw– was irony.
Lobsang: “The roads are always very clean. Even when it is clean, you would see people cleaning — cleaning on the cleaned roads. Because for them, the roads are very important not only for the Tibetans but also for the transportation and for the militaries to move from one place to another.”
While the paths leading out of Tibet are pristine, it’s the rivers within, Lobsang found, that are lined with garbage, and run with mud.
