Word: coal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Zhao, his fellow miners called him -- a weary-looking man, 54, wearing a yellow safety helmet and a miner's lamp strung around his neck, black coal dust embedded in the lines on his forehead and lightly powdering the insides of his ears. Last May Zhao and a team of other veterans were assigned to search for the bodies of 57 miners killed in Zuoyun County, deep in China's Shanxi province. The dead men had accidentally tunneled into a flooded mine shaft next to their own. "Many of them are very young--just boys," Zhao says, pausing to light...
...years, Zhao has worked as a miner in China's northeast, where much of the coal that drives the country's booming economy is mined. That longevity makes him a lucky man. Being a coal miner in China is one of the world's most dangerous jobs. Officially, about 5,000 of his fellow workers died in mining accidents last year. Unofficially, nobody knows how many were killed. In the space of a single week late last year, gas explosions and accidents in four mines left nearly 100 miners dead. Li Yizhong, head of the State Administration of Work Safety...
...Coal powers China. The original fossil fuel is the source of explosive economic growth in China, just as it was in Britain at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and in the U.S. later. China is the world's biggest consumer of coal, its factories and homes using nearly a third of total world production. Much of that coal is dug in tens of thousands of mines scattered across the windblasted ocher hills northeast of Beijing. It is here--more than in the textile factories of the south where Western activists complain of sweatshop conditions--that Chinese pay in blood...
...another. "There have been some noble efforts," says Hershkowitz, citing as an example cosmetics-brand-driven recycling programs that encourage customers to return used packaging. "But it's not the disposal of the plastic container that causes the big environmental impact. It's the production of the bottle. The coal, the gas, the coloring agents, the heavy-metal stabilizers, the refining of the petroleum to make the plastic containers?it all creates a tremendous amount of toxic air emissions...
...greenhouse gases without large job losses or high costs to industry and consumers. As well, some experts think that with the right settings, a carbon market can curb energy demand and lead to the take-up of new energy technologies (that is, as the Task Group said, "clean coal," gas, nuclear power and renewable sources...