Word: problem
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, about 3% of global carbon emissions. In addition, ships spew out huge amounts of traditional air pollutants, like nitrous oxides (NOx) and sulfur oxides (SOx), and emit black carbon soot, a leading contributor to melting Arctic ice. "It's an overlooked and important problem, but it's also extraterritorial," says Travis Bradford, the chief operating officer of the Carbon War Room, based in Washington, D.C. "And there's no external force that will cause the shipping industry to change...
...despite the sheer amount of carbon the shipping industry produces, its biggest emitters are relatively few. Bradford estimates that about 20,000 of the biggest and most polluting ships contribute about half the carbon emitted by the industry as a whole, so any solution to the emissions problem could be implemented much more easily than, say, changing the 800 million or so passenger cars in the world. "Ships could be retrofitted to be cleaner and more efficient quickly," says Bradford. (See the world's most polluted places...
...Carbon War Room's goal is first to raise awareness about the carbon problem within industries, then to publicize and spread the best solutions. In the case of shipping, the solution may be as simple as installing scrubbers - of the sort already used in planes and cars - that would vastly reduce emissions of SOx, NOx and black carbon. Older and more polluting ships will need to be replaced by models that are more efficient, and eventually carbon-based bunker fuels will need to be swapped out for low-carbon alternative fuels. The Carbon War Room is looking to start...
...take the lead in rooting out al-Qaeda within Yemen's borders. The U.S. is helping, boosting counter-terrorism funding for Yemen from less than $5 million in 2006 to $67 million in 2009, and dispatching CIA and military personnel to train Yemeni forces. But the al-Qaeda problem has been a lesser security priority for Yemen than two unrelated separatist insurgencies in the north and south of the country. (See pictures of conflict in Yemen...
...fact, Yemen itself offered one successful approach to the problem Obama now faces. Ever since a pair of al-Qaeda suicide bombers in a skiff attacked the USS Cole in Yemen's Aden harbor in 2000 and killed 17 U.S. sailors, Washington had been looking to punish the ringleader of the attack, Qaed Sinan Harithi. More than two years later, after learning he would be traveling across the country in an SUV, the U.S. launched a Predator drone. Once in the open countryside, safely away from any civilians, the drone fired a Hellfire missile into the vehicle, instantly dispatching Harithi...