Word: coal
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...numbers. Once dormant, insulated and ravaged by war and social upheaval, China is now the world's third biggest economy with more mobile-phone users and, by the end of this year, more car sales than anywhere else on the planet. But the story behind those numbers, of the coal miners and assembly-line workers, of the parents and children they've left behind and the arduous journeys made out of sheer desperation to find work, has rarely been given the same attention as the country's impressive economic achievements...
...race to develop renewable forms of energy "will be the nation that leads the global economy." That's something China's leadership heartily agrees with. China has become the world's leading producer of greenhouse gases, and many of its big cities choke on smog from cars and coal-fired power plants. But it is also a global pioneer in renewable energy. The government has mandated that by next year 3% of its power must come from renewable sources, excluding hydroelectricity, in which it is already among the world's top producers. That figure jumps...
That soupy brown air is the result of so-called black carbon expelled into the atmosphere in and around the Indian capital, from the burning of biomass for cookstoves and of black coal for electricity, and the incomplete combustion in the old diesel engines that propel most of the cars and trucks in the city. Breathing here isn't all that good for you - there's a reason the city is home to the "Delhi cough" - and now scientists are discovering that the sooty air isn't good for the climate either. According to some estimates, black carbon...
Unlike CO2, which can hang around in the atmosphere for centuries - CO2 that was emitted by the first coal-powered train is probably still in the air, warming the planet - black carbon has a relatively brief life span. It remains just a few weeks in the air before it falls to earth. That's key, because if the world could reduce black carbon emissions soon, it could help blunt warming almost instantly. "You can wait a week or a month and the totals in the atmosphere can be significantly different," says Eric Wilcox, an atmospheric scientist with NASA. Meanwhile...
...sprightly middle-aged man in the 1950s, Heinrich Boere dug for coal in the rich deposits surrounding the West German town of Eschweiler. Now age 88 and reliant on a wheelchair, he's having to revisit even darker depths that were reached during his lifetime. In what is likely to be one of Germany's last Nazi war crimes prosecutions, Boere is finally standing trial in the German city of Aachen for the murders of three Dutch civilians in 1944, when Boere was part of a Nazi death squad...