Word: planting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...their colleagues back home. The bill to the taxpayers? A relative bargain at $103 million. For its part, Playas owes its continued existence to the war on terrorism. It was built by Phelps Dodge Corp. in the 1970s to house employees of its nearby copper-smelting plant. But in 1999 the smelter closed and the town of 1,500 faced extinction. New Mexico Tech came to the rescue, buying the town and 1,200 acres around it for $5 million in 2004 and establishing the facility...
...mean a catastrophe." But conservationists say that eating scarlet ibis is merely emblematic of a country cannibalizing its natural resources through voracious industrial growth. "The habitat has been diminished steadily over the years," says John Agard, a lecturer in life sciences at the University of the West Indies. Petrochemical plants and the port itself are replacing the mangroves along the west coast, Agard notes, and from the north the city is expanding in the direction of the swamp. The highway on the swamp's eastern side chokes off the fresh water supply, changing the ecosystem of the swamp, which...
...change, biofuels have become the vanguard of the green-tech revolution, the trendy way for politicians and corporations to show they're serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming. The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol--ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter--in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil's filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion...
...when this deforestation effect is taken into account, corn ethanol and soy biodiesel produce about twice the emissions of gasoline. Sugarcane ethanol is much cleaner, and biofuels created from waste products that don't gobble up land have real potential, but even cellulosic ethanol increases overall emissions when its plant source is grown on good cropland. "People don't want to believe renewable fuels could be bad," says the lead author, Tim Searchinger, a Princeton scholar and former Environmental Defense attorney. "But when you realize we're tearing down rain forests that store loads of carbon to grow crops that...
...place to see this is America's biofuel mecca: Iowa. Last year fewer than 2% of U.S. gas stations offered ethanol, and the country produced 7 billion gal. (26.5 billion L) of biofuel, which cost taxpayers at least $8 billion in subsidies. But on Nov. 6, at a biodiesel plant in Newton, Iowa, Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled an eye-popping plan that would require all stations to offer ethanol by 2017 while mandating 60 billion gal. (227 billion L) by 2030. "This is the fuel for a much brighter future!" she declared. Barack Obama immediately criticized her--not for proposing...