Word: icelandic
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...Crawford argues that voters are increasingly looking to Europe. He points to a trio of well-to-do neighbors. "There are three countries around Scotland's shores: Ireland, Iceland and Norway - all small countries, all in the top six wealthiest nations on earth in terms of gdp per head," he says. "Small nations like Malta and Slovenia sit at the top table in the E.U., and Scotland is in the side room while the U.K. government negotiates...
...much downhill. Today Xianyang is one of the most polluted cities in a very polluted country, partly as a result of the air-fouling coal that's burned to generate much of its power. The air in Reykjavík, by contrast, is crystal clear, because nothing is burned there. Iceland's capital gets 100% of its heat and 40% of its electricity from geothermal power. (The rest comes from hydropower.) The same forces that have scattered no fewer than 130 volcanoes across the tiny country bring molten rock relatively close to the surface everywhere. When this encounters underground water...
This ambitious experiment in carbon sequestration landed in Iceland after scientists from Columbia University approached Grimsson. (The University of Iceland, the University of Toulouse and Reykjavík Energy are the other partners.) Grimsson traces his interest in climate change to the 1980s, when he met a fellow legislator who saw trouble on the horizon: Al Gore. Back home, Grimsson, 63, has witnessed Iceland's conversion from a coal-dependent economy to a nation that gets most of its heat from clean, renewable geothermal resources. "My job as a young boy was to get the coal for the house...
Grimsson "wants to make Iceland an example of what can be done," says Sigurdur Gislason, a research professor at the University of Iceland. "We have enormous amounts of clean energy and a small society. You can do experiments here that you can't do anywhere else...
Basalt sequestration is one of several efforts to boost Iceland's role in climate-change science, including research into soil carbon sequestration and hydrogen-powered transportation. And Grimsson isn't above doing some firsthand testing. "I probably shouldn't tell you this, but I was the first person to exceed the speed limit in a hydrogen-powered car," he says. "I wanted to test its capability...