Word: coal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Dang remembers the night in 1963 when the lights came on in Uong Bi. "People were so excited," the 70-year-old tea-shop owner says, recalling the cheers that rang through the northern Vietnamese town after one of the country's first coal-fired power plants began operating. "Their whole lives they had wished for electricity." Be careful what you wish for. Soon after the plant opened, Dang's wife developed a cough from the thick black smoke from the power plant that hung over the town. His children had near-constant runny noses and neighbors reported other nagging...
...just the residents of Uong Bi who are caught in this dilemma. Throughout Vietnam - indeed, in most of the developing world - demand for cheap electricity is quickly rising. But as countries turn to abundant coal as the energy source of choice, many worry an environmental catastrophe is in the making. As the rest of the world struggles for solutions to global warming, Vietnam has built eight new coal-fired power plants in the past five years and plans to open at least a dozen more by 2012. Last year, Vietnam got only 19% of its power from coal, relying mostly...
...This trend troubles Jasper Inventor, a climate and energy campaigner for the environmental group Greenpeace. Coal-burning plants generate 36% of the emissions blamed for global warming - far more than those produced by road traffic, which account for 17% of the world's CO2 emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. Inventor worries that by committing to coal, countries such as Vietnam are making a mistake that will be difficult, if not impossible, to undo. "In the longer term, we believe this will be a losing proposition for Vietnam," Inventor says...
...harvested by locals and sold for biofuel production. The plan dovetails with Beijing's ambitious goal of generating 2 million tons of bio-ethanol a year by 2010, and 15% of its energy from renewable resources by 2020. (Seventy percent of mainland China's energy comes from coal today.) In another desert village, drought-resistant shrubs called sand willows are being planted to keep encroaching sands at bay, but there are also plans to start processing them in a biomass thermal power plant, which will burn the willows to generate electricity and create another clean source of fuel...
Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, speaking to a crowd of about 250, said that Iceland has undergone a radical transformation from dependence on coal and oil in the past 30 years...