Word: coaling
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
Beyond making up the bricks of life, carbon is virtually inescapable in industry as well. The plastics that can be found in everything from your chair to the space shuttle contain carbon - as does, of course, our energy supply. Our main fossil fuels - coal, petroleum and gasoline - are made up of carbon that has been compressed in the Earth for millions of years and we're now burning and rapidly restoring to the atmosphere. (The same process occurs when we burn wood in a fireplace...
...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...
...Gore's goal seems far too much. Less than 28% of our power currently comes from carbon-free sources, and the vast majority of that is hydroelectric and nuclear. High-tech renewables account for less than 3%. Wind and solar are growing far faster than fossil fuels such as coal or natural gas, but considering that we don't even know if economical carbon capture and storage will ever be possible, it's hard to see how Gore's target is remotely attainable. This isn't negative thinking, or fiction put out by the oil industry. This is reality...