Word: semiarid
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...coal would wipe out the present glut of the fuel and help lift production from its current level of only about 650 million tons last year to the 1.2 billion-ton 1985 goal that Carter set for the industry in his first energy address two years ago. In the semiarid reaches of the intermountain West, where treasure troves of coal lie almost on the surface just waiting to be scraped up and hauled away, whole new towns would have to be built to house the workers employed at mines and synfuel plants. Residents of the region regard such a boom...
...venture was such a success that Carlsberg opened posher Stallion Springs Horse Ranch in semiarid land north of Los Angeles. Campers at Stallion are less interested in roughing it than riding it, drawn by the park's boarding stables, corrals and an equestrian show ring that seats 600. Though he also runs a profitable real estate and construction company, Carlsberg is concerned, he says, about "retaining land as much as possible in its natural beauty...
...than an engineer's pipedream. Solar energy will probably not become practicable on a large scale for several decades. Coal, which the U.S. has in abundance, does not seem to be the only answer. Deep mining is expensive and dangerous and stripmining scars the land, especially in the semiarid West. Coal-fired plants are also far from clean...
...profit?" she groans. "There's only one person in the world who'd buy it, and you already have." In fact, thousands of others have bought such desolate plots. According to an indictment handed down by a federal grand jury last week, 77,000 such "semiarid desert lots" have been sold-sight unseen...
History is full of such expensive errors, of cities and civilizations brought low because their leaders failed to exercise even ordinary foresight. Any good agronomist, for example, could have predicted that overplanting of semiarid land would lead to the vast Midwestern dust bowls of the '30s. Anybody with ordinary intelligence could have discerned in the '50s the potential for violence that resulted in the black explosions of the '60s. No disaster, however, has been more visible from a distance-or caught people more off guard-than the energy crisis. The failure to head it off, despite loud...