Word: gas
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...Some time around the 1970s, the car business had its first unimaginable crisis due to big cars and expensive gas. Since those car companies didn't learn anything from that experience, there have been episodic auto sector crises since then. And the whole world knows now what this inability to learn from their mistakes has done to the car companies. (See the 50 worst cars of all time...
Later incarnations of the electric car, such as the Detroit Electric, were more attractive than gas-powered versions because they didn't backfire. Before her husband Henry's mass production of gas-powered cars crushed the electric industry, Clara Ford drove a 1914 Detroit Electric, which could last 80 miles without a charge...
...Tesla Roadster, which first hit the streets in 2006, boasted a sticker price starting at $90,000 each - well out of reach for most consumers. The latest entry, the Chevy Volt, is expected to be released by 2011; however, the Volt is actually a plug-in hybrid with a gas-powered engine that kicks in as a generator to recharge the car's batteries...
...When Americans do look at a new car, their vision is likely to be short-sighted. Gasoline is back under $1.70 and if oil moves down further prices will fall more. If a hybrid runs $5,000 more than a traditional gas car, who is going to pay that difference to save the environment. No one, particularly when the cost of filling up is down by more than half what is was last summer. Who cares what happens...
That means that barring a swift and sudden reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions, by the end of the century an average July day will almost certainly be hotter than the hottest heat waves we experience now. And the extreme heat will wilt our crops. Battisti and Naylor looked at the effect that major heat waves have had on agriculture in the past - like the ruthless heat in Western Europe during the summer of 2003 - and found that crop yields have suffered deeply. In Italy, maize yields fell 36% in 2003, compared with the previous year, and in France they fell...