Word: coal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...large part, the book is popular because fervid environmentalists can find in it justification for their thesis that nuclear power and coal are dirty, dangerous and unreliable, while solar energy and conservation are good and can provide the necessary energy. Yet the authors take pains to distance themselves from the small but vocal faction of extremists who hope that energy shortages will hold back technology, slow industrial growth, break up large industry and fragment society into smaller groups of people, tending their own gardens and building their own windmills. As the Harvard experts stress in Chapter...
...book's basic thesis, which was reported in Foreign Affairs and TIME last spring, is both conventional and incontestable. It is that the nation's four basic fuels-petroleum, natural gas, coal and nuclear-are either depleting or face strong public opposition, and new energy sources must be phased in before the old are totally exhausted. The surprising aspect of Energy Future is its optimistic assessment of the potential of solar energy and conservation to carry the load as those "new sources...
...attempts to recover left-behind oil in old wells. Natural gas, in their view, also has a dim future because proven reserves have been steadily shrinking. Even before Three Mile Island, notes the book, nuclear power was declining. Finally, mining, transportation and pollution problems rule out big increases in coal production...
...book went to press, of course, before President Carter made his bold proposal for a crash program to produce synthetic fuels from sources as varied as shale, coal, sugar beets and even garbage. Congressmen are increasingly worried that his program may be too costly, too ambitious, too bureaucratic. Yet synfuel is precisely the sort of project, though dismissed by the Harvard experts in advance, that holds tremendous promise. Already, synfuel is being produced economically abroad. For the U.S. to downplay it and put most of its chips on solar and conservation would...
Wyoming's Powder River Basin, a huge treeless ellipse that runs from Casper north to Sheridan, contains an estimated 400 billion metric tons of coal-enough to provide the entire U.S. electricity needs for the next 250 years...