Word: coale
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Iceland, the University of Toulouse and Reykjavík Energy are the other partners.) Grimsson traces his interest in climate change to the 1980s, when he met a fellow legislator who saw trouble on the horizon: Al Gore. Back home, Grimsson, 63, has witnessed Iceland's conversion from a coal-dependent economy to a nation that gets most of its heat from clean, renewable geothermal resources. "My job as a young boy was to get the coal for the house for my grandmother," he says, recalling Reykjavík's soot-black skies. "If Iceland could achieve such a radical change...
...climate scientists use the word adaptation, they are referring to actions intended to safeguard a person, community, business or country against the effects of climate change. Its complement is mitigation--any measure that will reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, such as drawing power from a wind turbine rather than a coal-fired power plant. Mitigation addresses, if you will, the front end of the global-warming problem; by cutting emissions, it aims to slow rising temperatures. Adaptation is the back end of the problem--trying to live with the changes in the environment and the economy that global warming...
...cleared for cane fields. Better still would be to process ethanol from agricultural waste like wood chips or the humble summer grass called switchgrass. The cellulosic ethanol they produce packs more energy than corn ethanol, but it also takes more energy to manufacture. "If you make ethanol by burning coal, you defeat the purpose," says Sarah Hessenflow Harper, an analyst for the advocacy group Environmental Defense...
Even if researchers master the mechanics of sequestration, they must still develop a way to separate CO2 from power-plant exhaust so that there will be something to stash in the cavities in the first place. There are two promising methods. One is to gasify coal before it's burned, reducing it to a high-pressure synthetic gas that can be stripped of its carbon, leaving mostly hydrogen behind. The alternative is to pulverize coal as power-plant operators do now but then rely on new hardware to separate the CO2 after burning. Both methods are at least 20 years...
...over the past three to four years. But if there's a deal that can get done, it's this one. They're addressing all the right hot buttons--providing rate certainty to customers, a premium to shareholders, even an environmental section that would reduce the number of their coal-fired electricity plants. The only wild card here is what regulators and politicians will...