Word: cheaping
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...time to replenish its heat. While the ongoing costs of a geothermal power plant are low - Krafla, for example, has only 15 full-time employees - the start-up technology needed to extract heat from a few miles beneath the earth's surface and convert it to electricity is not cheap. By some estimates, conducting the necessary geologic surveys and exploratory drilling for one plant can take up to eight years and $20 million before the turbines start turning. "The high cost is a barrier to everybody," says Karl Gawell, executive director of the U.S.-based Geothermal Energy Association...
...Avoided deforestation seems like a no-brainer - so why wasn't it included in the Kyoto Protocol? Ironically, it was omitted in part due to the work of a number of prominent environmental groups, including Greenpeace. They feared that avoided deforestation schemes could flood the trading market with countless cheap carbon credits; after all, there are an estimated 638 billion tons of carbon locked in the world's forests. If even a fraction of those credits are put on the market, it could let developed countries off the hook when it comes to making the hard changes in industry...
...those who care about forests and the climate, the promise of REDD is undeniable. The truth is that weaning the world off fossil fuels will be a monumentally difficult and expensive process, one that will demand technological innovations we haven't yet thought of. But halting deforestation, while not cheap - Britain's Stern Review in 2006 pegged the price at $5 to $15 billion a year - is doable now, provided we have the political will. If you want to know why, visit Noel Kempff. Its biological value was incalculable, but to the people who lived in the forest, its only...
...concrete. Not the cheap, gray, easily cracked, soulless stuff that gave urbanization a bad name when it was slathered over Western cities in the 1960s, but newfangled, bright - and still relatively expensive - concrete that has come onto the market this decade. High-performance or ultra-high-performance concrete, as it's known in the industry, is up to 10 times stronger than regular concrete. Although, pound-by-pound, it costs several times as much as regular concrete, industry officials say price comparisons are misleading because the high-tech versions have different properties that make them more comparable to materials such...
...presidential election for this very reason. Often, recounts are triggered automatically by extremely close margins, as in the Minnesota race; in some states, a candidate can request a recount, finance it and be reimbursed with public funds if the recount reverses the vote. (Recounts do not come cheap: one of the most famous in recent history, for Washington governor in 2004, cost the state Democratic Party $730,000. When the recount gave the election to Democrat Christine Gregoire, the initial loser, the state paid the party back. The final margin: 133 votes out of more than 2.8 million cast...