Word: impactful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Predictions of Western Europe's demise, however, proved to be premature. The U.S. recovery and appetite for imports helped spur the Continent's economies. But self-help played a major role as well. With one eye on the impact of the Reagan Revolution in the U.S., the area's governments reduced taxes, scissored red tape and encouraged investment. A new breed of hard-driving Euroentrepreneurs has emerged, bent not only on streamlining the Continent's industries but also on spearheading a European invasion of corporate America. Last year British raiders alone spent $32 billion on U.S. companies, compared with...
...which when burned spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Since the air is already dangerously overburdened by carbon dioxide from the cars and factories of industrial nations, the torching of the Amazon could magnify the greenhouse effect -- the trapping of heat by atmospheric CO2. No one knows just what impact the buildup of CO2 will have, but some scientists fear that the globe will begin to warm up, bringing on wrenching climatic changes...
...billion, 324,000-sq.-mi. Grande Carajas Program, located in the eastern Amazon, seeks to exploit Brazil's mineral deposits, perhaps the world's largest, which include iron ore, manganese, bauxite, copper and nickel. The principal iron-ore mine began production in 1985, and its operation has little impact on the forest. The problem, however, is the smelters that convert the ore into pig iron. They are powered by charcoal, and the cheapest way to obtain it is by chopping down the surrounding forests and burning the trees. Environmentalists fear that Grande Carajas will repeat the dismal experience...
...begin at its edges, in places such as Acre and Rondonia. While the Amazon forest as a whole generates roughly half of its own moisture, the percentage is much higher in these western states, far from the Atlantic. This means that deforestation is likely to have a more dramatic impact on the climate in the west than it would in the east. "Imagine the effects of a dry season extended by two months," says Fearnside. The process of deforestation could become self-perpetuating as heat, drying and wind cause the trees to die on their...
...burning of the forests goes on much longer, the damage may become irreversible. Long before the great rain forests are destroyed altogether, the impact of deforestation on climate could dramatically change the character of the area, lead to mass extinctions of plant and animal species, and leave Brazil's poor to endure even greater misery than they do now. The people of the rest of the world, no less than the Brazilians, need the Amazon as a functioning system, and in the end, this is more important than the issue of who owns the forest. The Amazon may run through...