Word: capped
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Even the most uninformed student of climate change could tell you that the solution to global warming is to mitigate global greenhouse gas emissions, and fast. But the political difficulties of mitigation aside (the first major federal cap-and-trade legislation will be up soon in the Senate, and isn't expected to pass), the problem is that the sheer amount of greenhouse gases we've already pumped into the atmosphere has irreversibly bound us to a certain amount of warming over the next several decades - no matter what we do, we'll have to adapt...
...America's Climate Security Act, a bill that would finally attempt to make carbon-emission reduction a federal objective. Co-sponsored by Senators Joseph Lieberman and John Warner, the measure calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions 18% below 2005 levels by 2020, and nearly 70% by 2050, using a cap-and-trade system that steadily reduces the amount of carbon that industry is allowed to emit on an annual basis. The bill has garnered solid support across the political spectrum - corporations like General Electric and environmental groups like Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) have both come out in favor...
Even some energy corporations that favor cap and trade in general, like North Carolina's Duke Energy, are lobbying against the act, claiming it would hit coal-dependent utilities too hard. Some green groups like Friends of the Earth (FoE) also oppose it, arguing the bill's emission-reduction goals are too timid. They want to wait to pass legislation until 2009, when a new President and Congress will presumably be more open to a stronger measure. "It is a wholly inadequate response to the greatest environmental crisis of our time," said FoE president Brent Blackwelder...
...oddly ex post facto quality of celestial news more surreally on display than on May 25, when the Phoenix spacecraft touched down on Mars, the first landing ever in the Red Planet's polar region. In order to arrive at its destination in one piece, Phoenix had to cap its sleepy 10-month journey with a fiery 7-min. plunge through the atmosphere, during which it opened its parachutes, jettisoned its heat shield, fired its engines and decelerated from a blistering 12,700 m.p.h. (20,400 km/h) to a toe-in-the-dust touchdown speed of a few feet...
...there can be a strong temptation towards what might be called green-collar inflation, because the idea that environmentalism can actually add jobs is key to the new arguments for global warming action. On the surface, cap and trade and other anti-climate change policies look like short-term economic losers that will raise the cost of energy and lead to job loss. Certainly that's the argument of many conservatives - a study by the National Association of Manufacturers estimated that one of the main carbon cap-and-trade proposals before Congress would cost the U.S. economy...