Word: coaling
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...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...
States are also joining hands to curb emissions from power plants--the coal burned in Pennsylvania, after all, doesn't pause at the New Jersey state line. In 2003 then Governor George Pataki of New York launched the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a confederation of northeastern and mid-Atlantic states that has created its own cap-and-trade program, with the goal of reducing emissions 10% below the current level by 2019. Nine states are part of the group, with Maryland set to join in June. In February five Western states embraced a similarly ambitious goal...
...matter how aggressively the U.S. tackles its carbon problem, the global outlook hinges on the coal-fired economies of the world's two looming giants: China and India. Between 1990 and 2004, energy consumption rose 37% in India and 53% in China. Beijing is building new coal-fired power plants at the startling rate of one every week. While the most technologically sophisticated coal plants operate at almost 45% efficiency, China's top out at just...