Word: petroleum
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...took off into the bright sky late Sunday morning. First, there were only five people on board, while more than 100 watched intently from a nearby hangar. Second, the plane was the first commercial jet ever to fly on biofuel, a fuel produced from plant matter instead of petroleum or other fossil fuels. "This is the first stage on a journey towards renewable fuel," Virgin founder Richard Branson told reporters in the hangar shortly before takeoff, his voice drowned out every now and then by the roar of overhead planes. "It's the equivalent of those exciting first few steps...
Maybe it was simply too good to be true. For proponents, biofuels - petroleum substitutes made from plant matter like corn or sugar cane - seemed to promise everything. Using biofuels rather than oil would reduce the greenhouse gases that accelerate global warming, because plants absorb carbon dioxide when they grow, balancing out the carbon released when burned in cars or trucks. Using homegrown biofuels would help the U.S. reduce its utter dependence on foreign oil, and provide needed income for rural farmers around the world. And unlike cars powered purely by electric batteries or hydrogen fuel cells - two alternate technologies that...
...your tank with gasoline today, or warmed your home with natural gas, there's a decent chance you sent some money to Abu Dhabi. The capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is blessed with fossil fuels, including the fourth-biggest reserves of oil in the world. Selling that petroleum at record prices has helped Abu Dhabi achieve the highest per-capita GDP in the world - wealth that's visible in every luxury hotel rising from the desert or spotless Mercedes prowling the streets. All those fossil fuels also mean that Abu Dhabi citizens have among the biggest carbon footprints...
...Mohammad bin Zayed Al Nahaya announced that the government would channel an additional $15 billion to the Masdar Initiative. Although the money comes with no time frame, and officials wouldn't say exactly where the funding will go, Masdar also announced that it would join Rio Tinto and British Petroleum to build the world's first hydrogen power plant, a 500-megawatt operation that would cost at least $2 billion...
...Real Diaper Association, an advocacy group founded in 2004, estimates that 27.4 billion disposable diapers are used each year in the U.S. (according to the EPA, that translates into more than 3.4 million tons of waste dumped into landfills) and that producing those diapers also consumes huge amounts of petroleum, chlorine, wood pulp and water. Team Pampers argues that the water and energy required to launder cloth diapers cancel out those costs...