Word: fueled
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...shuttle Atlantis is once again in orbit - this time for a final servicing visit to the venerable Hubble Space Telescope - and once again the world is sweating out reports of damage to the spacecraft's thermal tiles caused by debris shed from the external fuel tank during liftoff on Monday. It was just that kind of mishap that doomed the shuttle Columbia and its seven-member crew back in 2003, allowing superheated gases to penetrate the ship during re-entry and causing it to disintegrate. That was the second shuttle to be lost in flight, after the explosion of Challenger...
...hard to see how. Earlier studies exposed corn ethanol as a carbon catastrophe; the EPA had to use extremely generous assumptions to produce scenarios in which it's even remotely attractive as a fuel alternative. In any case, the heavily subsidized corn-ethanol industries won't really be penalized for promoting deforestation and accelerating global warming; Congress exempted its existing plants from any consequences in the 2007 law requiring the stress tests. At her May 5 news conference with Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Jackson suggested this was a good thing, because corn ethanol...
...Farm fuels can sound like the ultimate win-win situation, reducing our dependence on carbon-intense fossil fuels while boosting demand for American farm products. And they're "renewable," which has become a kind of synonym for green. But years ago, researchers began raising concerns about the direct emissions created by the heavy machinery and petroleum-based fertilizers it takes to grow corn and other biofuel feedstocks, the energy-intensive plants that convert the crops into fuel and the trucks that transport the fuel to market. A slew of studies have concluded that when you include all these life-cycle...
...real problem with farm fuels, as Searchinger and others have shown, is in the indirect effects on land use: when an acre of land is used to grow fuel instead of food, an extra acre somewhere else is probably going to be converted into farmland to grow food. And that acre may well be an acre of wetland or forest that would otherwise store loads of carbon. So farm fuels become a lose-lose deal: exacerbating the deforestation that already creates one fifth of the world's carbon emissions, and driving up global food prices. (See pictures of the global...
...also true that there's a lot of uncertainty when it comes to biofuels. But it's not good uncertainty. Study after study suggests that growing fuel could be a disaster for the planet, while raising global food prices and promoting global food riots. The amount of grain it takes to fill an SUV with ethanol could feed an adult for a year; we need every acre of farmland to feed the world. President Obama never claimed to be a reformer when it came to ethanol, and he and Vilsack have been big supporters of next-generation biofuels. Maybe there...