Word: coale
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Three Gorges is vital to their country's future -- and actually good for the environment as a whole. They say it will prevent the periodic flooding that has claimed 500,000 lives in this century. More important, its production of clean hydroelectric power will reduce China's reliance on coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, which now supplies 75% of the country's energy needs. The burning of coal has cast a pall of pollution over major Chinese cities and helped make pulmonary disease the nation's leading cause of death...
...maintains its annual economic growth rate of 11%, the country will need to add 17,000 megawatts of electrical generating capacity each year for the rest of the decade. Within 10 years, that would be as much new power as the U.S. generates overall today. If China uses mostly coal to produce that power, the greenhouse effect could be catastrophic...
Many opponents of Three Gorges have no quarrel with the effort to move away from coal toward hydropower. But they argue that for a lower price, numerous smaller dams could produce more power and greater flood-control benefits. They fear that a dam so large on the notoriously muddy Yangtze will lead to dangerous buildups of silt in some parts of the river, creating new obstacles to navigation and causing floods upstream. Chinese officials respond that both big and small dams are needed. Indeed, 10 projects smaller than Three Gorges, with a total capacity of nearly 12,000 megawatts...
That leaves no way around a heavy dependence on coal. The best China can hope for, say experts, is to cut coal's portion of the energy mix from 75% to 60% by 2010. The imperative, then, is to find cleaner, more efficient ways to burn the plentiful fossil fuel, reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, sulfur compounds and the incompletely combusted particles that form soot...
...cautioned: not everyone gets what they want. Surely more than a few lumps of coal await these guys, but just remember--betting on who's naughty and who's nice, just like reprinting this column without the expressed written consent of Major League Baseball, is strictly prohibited...