Suggest the drinking is related to difficulties of adaptations to, and even of any clear understanding of, rapid socio-cultural change coming from the outside and the denigration of local culture involved, both in objective terms - insecure sense of identities, commoditization, new irrelevance of traditional cultural understandings, etc. Doesn't exactly strike me as mysterious. Religion, including 'new' religion, can play a part in this, either aggressively or defensively, but usually a bit ambiguously, a bit of both.

I think Rock is buried in Hawaii.

Plenty of articles about problems caused by hydropower. 'Cleaner', well, maybe, but clearly not good enough in the long run, which is going to require further development of solar, geothermal, wind, etc. It's going to be expensive in terms of money, but that's where the money has to be put in. In the meantime, maybe you've got a point, but the meantime isn't going to last all that long, and it's probably not a good idea to move too many people around, silt up dams, ruin fisheries, risk dam collapses in earthquake-prone areas and all the rest...no, I don't know a lot about this stuff, and burning fossil fuels, including natural gas, is obviously lousy, and nuclear power is really good and clean and safe until it isn't (Japan, not long ago)...okay, I'm no expert.

Then again, Chinese, as well as Lao and Thai, hydroelectric potential seems to be screwing up the Mekong for many in Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and the Mekong Delta in Viet Nam.

@ michael: Got your point. Southeast Asian countries are closer, but then Viet Nam, Laos, Myanmar have plenty of hydroelectric power generation potential of their own, although some of them (Laos, for instance, which can and to some extent does provide power to Thailand) probably don't have the cash to develop it. Rather doubt that Viet Nam, for one, would want to become dependent on Chinese power generation.