Word: coal
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When Barack Obama chose Joe Biden as his running mate, he surely had Scranton, Pennsylvania, on his mind. Biden, Delaware's senior Senator, was born in this former coal-mining town two hours north of Philadelphia - a point made countless times during his anointment as the Democratic Party's Vice Presidential candidate. To win the crucial swing state, Obama needs help in towns like Scranton, where Hillary Clinton won 74% of the vote in the Democratic primary and where many are still offended by Obama's remarks about "bitter" small town Pennsylvania voters...
...service announcement on littering, starring himself and Office actor Brian Baumgartner (accountant Kevin Malone), agrees the show has been great for tourism. "The stars are here all the time," he says. "It's a riot. They love it." And Scranton needs all the love it can get: after the coal mining industry started to dry up in the 1950s - around the time Biden's family left for the greener pastures of Delaware - it fell into a deep depression and has only just begun to crawl out. "When the city started to decline and the coal industry moved out, we suffered...
...town on what's jokingly called a biyuntao--"avoid Olympics package"--which rhymes with the Chinese word for condom. Others, including huge numbers of migrant workers, have been forced out. A group of builders from Sichuan who lived in our courtyard while refurbishing the neighborhood left recently, taking their coal cooking stove and pet kitten with them. A few blocks away, restaurant owner Liu Ruilin complains that some of his best customers are gone. "I thought the Olympics were going to be good for business," he says. "But lots of outsiders are leaving...
...have soft-pedaled this basic governmental responsibility in the Reagan pendulum cycle. In the 2000 campaign, Al Gore proposed a new sort of infrastructure spending: a massive alternative-energy program - $15 billion a year for 10 years - to replace the country's dependence on fossil fuels like oil and coal. You may not remember this plan, because Gore's political consultants decided it didn't "test" well. It has now been revived by Obama, who has been logging a lot of phone time with Gore. But Obama has changed the emphasis a bit to promote "green collar" job development, like...
...emissions so difficult. But the surprising truth, Roston writes, is that we have actually been decarbonizing over time. Humanity's main fuel for eons was wood, which has a carbon-to-hydrogen ratio of 10 to 1 when burned; by comparison, that ratio is 2 to 1 for coal and 1 to 2 for oil. The problem is that we're burning ever larger amounts of fossil fuels, putting a greater concentration of carbon into the atmosphere than has been seen for millions of years. Though carbon has its positive points, even in the air - it feeds plants, and without...