Word: gal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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With or without Chávez's oil, U.S. homeowners are facing lower heating costs this winter: about $2.25 per gal. of heating oil, compared with a record high of more than $4.50 last year. Still, those households are also confronting the worst economic crisis since the Depression and the unemployment and precarious finances that come with it. As a result, politicians like Democratic U.S. Representative Chaka Fattah, many of whose Philadelphia constituents have received the Citgo fuel, wonder why U.S. oil giants like ExxonMobil - which saw a record $40 billion profit in 2007 and probably broke that...
...world has a water crisis - that much is undeniable. But it's also our own doing. Although just a tiny fraction of the world's 326 quintillion gal. of water is usable by humans, we would have more than enough to go around if we took care of it. We don't. From industrial accidents like the benzene spill in northeastern China three years ago, which contaminated the drinking water of millions of people, to the lack of toilets (or proper sanitation) throughout much of the developing world, we're making good water unusable. As a result, our supplies...
...much of Southern California, Orange County is dry and getting drier, and the aquifer from which the county pumps much of its water is slowly draining. Importing water from wetter Northern California is an option, but an expensive one (at least $530 per acre-foot, or about 326,000 gal., of water). Meanwhile, population growth means that officials have to do something with the increasing amount of wastewater that residents and businesses are producing. (See the world's most polluted places...
Orange County water officials decided to solve both problems at the same time. The result is the Groundwater Replenishment System (GRS), a glistening, $480 million facility that sits next to an older sewage-treatment plant. The GRS takes in about 70 million gal. of wastewater a day, puts it through a multistep cleaning process, then discharges the treated water into Orange County's aquifers. About half forms a barrier against seawater, which has been infiltrating groundwater sources as the county has dried up, while the other half slowly filters into the aquifers that supply drinking water for the county...
...feel different. It seems as if Americans have made a real and fundamental commitment to consuming less energy. That is not so much out of idealism as it is the good side, for a change, of our short attention span. When the price of gasoline shot past $4 per gal., it was both shocking and reassuring. Economists had long wondered what price it would take to get our attention. This, at last, was it. Yet $4 gas turned out not to be the end of the world. Although it was devastating for some people - and it surely accelerated our plunge...