Word: carbonization
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...CARBON CREDIT OFFSETS Under the Kyoto treaty to combat global warming, Western Europe and Japan must reduce carbon emissions below 1990 levels. (The U.S. has refused to ratify the treaty.) One way to reach the target involves paying poorer countries to keep their land under forests, which absorb carbon from the atmosphere. For example, Japan could pay Peru not to log rain forest. The amount of carbon absorbed by those trees would then be counted as a credit on Japan's carbon-emission balance sheet. "This would reverse a trend in human history," says Irvin. "Suddenly land is more valuable...
...coal, but it seems unthinkable that we will continue to use them as we do now, for nearly 80% of our energy. It's not just a question of supply and price, or even of the diseases caused by filthy air. We know that global warming from heat-trapping carbon dioxide, a by-product of fossil-fuel burning, threatens to cause chaos with the world's climate. And the terrorist assault on the World Trade Center raises other scary scenarios: how much easier would it be to crack open the Trans-Alaska pipeline and how much deadlier would...
...billion on renewables through the next five years. Japanese manufacturers, led by Sharp and Kyocera, have moved aggressively into photovoltaic cells, which turn sunlight into electricity. And in April General Electric snapped up Enron Wind from the bankrupt energy giant. "We are on a journey to a lower-carbon world," says Graham Baxter, an executive at Britain's BP, which is building a $100 million solar plant in Spain...
...Policymakers must factor in the price of pollution: coal plants are more expensive than renewable power when one includes the cost of scrubbers on smokestacks and the expense of health care for coal-related illnesses; nuclear energy costs would soar without government insurance. Environmentalists are calling for taxes on carbon to slow the growth of fossil-fuel...
...more immediate approach to developing eco-friendly cars involves reducing their all-around energy requirements in the first place. The steel that most cars are made of could be replaced by carbon-fiber polymers, which are lighter and more aerodynamic, as well as easy to make. The body panels on the diminutive Smart car from DaimlerChrysler are made of a recyclable thermoplastic alloy called Xenoy that is several times lighter than steel and helps the car get up to 65 m.p.g. Some 116,000 Smarts were sold last year in Europe and Japan, a 16% increase over 2000. But Americans...