Word: planetful
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There is real reason for excitement. Much to the surprise of technology analysts, Africa is the fastest-growing mobile phone market on the planet and Safaricom has profited handsomely by catering to customers who don't have a lot to spend. In 2007, the company's pre-tax profit was $370 million, making it what was believed to be the most successful company in the continent outside South Africa. The more stunning figure is its subscriber base - which grew from less than 20,000 in 2000 to about 10 million today, upending the conventional wisdom that sub-Saharan Africans, especially...
...Calling it "The Adventure of Many Lifetimes," Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin just announced a joint venture with Virgin CEO Sir Richard Branson to colonize the Red Planet because, as the press release states, "Earth has issues, and it's time humanity got started on a Plan...
...allowing them to keep their trees and capitalize on them. For the rest of the world, stopping tropical deforestation is among the most pressing of environmental tasks. Not only would halting deforestation drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it would save the most ecologically diverse and valuable land on the planet, home to animals and plants that can live nowhere else. Charity alone, as we've seen over the past several decades, won't be enough - the Stern report, a British government study on climate change released in 2006, estimated that it would take $10 to $15 billion a year...
...means limiting the expansion of agriculture, a daunting task as the world's population keeps expanding. And saving forests is probably an impossibility so long as vast expanses of cropland are used to grow modest amounts of fuel. The biofuels boom, in short, is one that could haunt the planet for generations--and it's only getting started...
...lesson behind the math is that on a warming planet, land is an incredibly precious commodity, and every acre used to generate fuel is an acre that can't be used to generate the food needed to feed us or the carbon storage needed to save us. Searchinger acknowledges that biofuels can be a godsend if they don't use arable land. Possible feedstocks include municipal trash, agricultural waste, algae and even carbon dioxide, although none of the technologies are yet economical on a large scale. Tilman even holds out hope for fuel crops--he's been experimenting with Midwestern...