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...increasingly out-of-touch communists, sensing the state's slipping grip on power, tried to push through a belated industrial expansion by force. In 2007, at least a dozen villagers in Nandigram were killed by state police during protests against the seizure of their land for a chemical plant. In 2008, similar protests pushed Tata Motors to cancel plans to manufacture its $2,500 Nano in the village of Singur, a political debacle that contributed to the communists' severe losses in the 2009 national elections. Basu had retired in 2000, but his high-handed rule left permanent damage, says Tathagata...
Beyond that, says David Lobell, a Stanford colleague of Field's and his co-author on a major 2007 review of how plants and climate interact, "while there's pretty clear evidence that CO2 helps plants, there's plenty of debate about how much it helps." One reason is that plants depend not only on carbon dioxide for healthy growth, but also on water and other nutrients. Increase CO2 without increasing the other factors, and you can get plants that are bigger, but relatively deficient in, say, nitrogen - meaning insects may have to eat more of each plant to stay...
...change will, moreover, lead to different effects in different parts of the world. "In northern areas," says Lobell, "you'll see an expansion of the growing season" - which, if the Finnish study is correct, won't necessarily help forests, but could be good for crops, since you can deliberately plant seeds that are suited to long summers. But in arid parts of the tropics, he says, where plant growth is limited by the availability of water, more frequent droughts could make things worse. "Large parts of the world," says Field, "are already at the warm edge of where things like...
...license the revolutionary manufacturing process he's invented to build the cars, which he says expends far less energy than more traditional auto-making factories. He claims that his iStream system, as he's dubbed it, requires a fifth of the capital investment that a standard, high-volume car plant needs, and only 20% of the space. "But you can't sell an idea, especially one this disruptive and radical. You must have a physical entity," he says. (See pictures of a steam-powered car setting a land-speed record...
...sucks up an awful lot of energy. Murray says his iStream system involves using composite plastic panels made by injection molding which are screwed or bolted onto a frame made of tubular steel. In the U.S., he says, the frames and molded panels could be made at one central plant, while the assembly could be done at smaller plants near distributors, which means fewer cars being trucked long distances...