Word: coal
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...over new zealand, people are fighting the power. At Marsden Point, near Whangarei, Greenpeace activists held a sit-in atop a disused power station last month to protest plans to restart the plant and run it on coal. On the Gowan river, near Marlborough, kayakers turned a March 5 whitewater festival into a demonstration against a hydroelectricity project. In the Waikato, south of Auckland, furious farmers last week burned in effigy the boss of a company that wants to run a power line through their green acres on pylons 70 m high. Bring electricity infrastructure too close to a Kiwi...
...that Kiwis don't grasp the problem. A recent survey by power company Contact Energy found that "overwhelmingly people value security of supply ahead of price or environmental concerns," says chief executive Stephen Barrett. New Zealand has plenty of options for ensuring that security: rushing rivers for hydroelectricity, rich coal reserves that, thanks to the gas windfall, have hardly been touched. But for almost every option there are opponents, sometimes very angry ones. And the delay-plagued process for vetting resource developments makes it easy for the noisy to get their way. "Small numbers of people, who may not even...
...about coal - of which the country has enough, experts say, to match the output of 50 Maui gas fields? When dwindling gas flows forced the country's largest power station, at Huntly, to switch to coal last year, there were noisy protests. Once the old station at Marsden Point is modernized, it will be the cleanest coal-fired plant in Australasia, says its owner, Mighty River Power. But that doesn't impress critics, who say getting electricity from coal is a betrayal of New Zealand's Kyoto Protocol obligations. "It's a backward step for us to start using coal...
...country's most valuable companies. Last year, it became a powerful symbol of the nation's crony capitalism. In a privatization widely decried as rigged, Kryvorizhstal was sold last June by the state to Viktor Pinchuk, the son-in-law of then-President Leonid Kuchma, and coal-and-steel magnate Rinat Akhmetov, for $800 million, less than half the amount offered by outside firms. The case stirred public outrage and quickly became a rallying point during Ukraine's orange revolution. Viktor Yushchenko, the former opposition leader who was elected President in December after street protests forced a rerun...
...behind inefficient trade barriers. But perhaps most pertinent today, many regions that got left furthest behind have faced special obstacles and hardships: diseases such as malaria, drought-prone climates in locations not suitable for irrigation, extreme isolation in mountains and landlocked regions, an absence of energy resources such as coal, gas and oil, and other liabilities that have kept these areas outside of the mainstream of global economic growth. Countries ranging from Bolivia to Malawi to Afghanistan face challenges almost unknown in the rich world, challenges that are at first harrowing to contemplate, but on second thought encouraging...