Word: coal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...election is our next President’s energy policy. George W. Bush’s presidency has been marked by a stubborn unwillingness to recognize the importance of human action in mitigating climate change. Our energy and transportation sectors, which are overwhelmingly dependent on nonrenewable fossil fuels like coal and petroleum, are long due for a comprehensive overhaul...
...really understand how carbon accumulates in the atmosphere. Increasing global temperatures are driven by the increase in the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere. Before the industrial age, the concentration was about 280 parts per million (p.p.m.) of carbon in the atmosphere. After a few centuries of burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels, we've raised that concentration to 387 p.p.m., and it continues to rise by about 2 p.p.m. every year. Many scientists believe that we need to at least stabilize carbon concentrations at 450 p.p.m. to ensure that global temperatures don't increase more than about...
...Just outside the town is a state-of-the-art coal-fired power plant built by the German utility Steag, which alone provides about 5% of Turkey's electricity. When it started operations in 2003, the $1.5 billion plant was the biggest single foreign investment in the country. In nearby Isdemir, a giant steel mill built in the 1970s by Russian engineers using Soviet technology is undergoing massive renovation. Some 18,000 workers used to produce just over 2 million tons of steel here; now about 6,000 people produce almost three times as much - and the plant consumes less...
...depression? Morgan says it's too soon to tell: it depends on how long people remain unemployed. A full-blown recession lasting three or four years or longer would be cause for concern. Morgan cites increased rates of depression and suicide in British cities that relied on steel and coal manufacturing in the mid-1980s, when factories started shutting down permanently. And the suddenness of the current crash doesn't make things easier. Former Lehman Brothers employees, he says, "have some emotional catching up to do," because they hardly saw what was coming and went right into the euphoria phase...
Polluters such as coal power plants and automobiles have shouldered the brunt of the attention on climate change. It helps that you can actually see them spewing black exhaust. But people often forget that when they plug in their home electronics - whether it's a jumbo flat-screen TV or an iPod - the electricity that juices those devices has a carbon footprint too. As the amount of electronics in our homes continues to increase - half of American households now own three TVs, up from 11% in 1975 - it becomes more and more important that they are energy efficient. Ditto...