Word: standard
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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First of all, it's important to understand what the climate-change bill does and doesn't do. The bill includes a raft of energy-efficiency provisions and a renewable-energy standard that will require 20% of all U.S. electricity to come from alternative sources by 2020. Chiefly, though, Waxman-Markey puts a cap on almost all of the greenhouse-gas emissions produced by the U.S. economy - everything from utilities to industry to transportation - setting a limit on how much carbon the country can produce. Industries are issued allowances each year that give them the right to emit a certain...
...ensure the cost will be manageable. But that's the problem. To keep conservative Democrats on board - especially those in the coal-heavy Midwest and Southeast - Waxman and Markey allowed the bill to be watered down considerably, loosening the overall carbon cap and scaling back the renewable-energy standard. When the powerful farm lobby balked at the bill, it was changed to allow farmers to sell offsets from agriculture, such as no-till farming, which leaves carbon in the soil. Worse, oversight of the agricultural offsets was taken away from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and given to the Department...
...become "a very modest millionaire." Fantastic. And in one of those typical "What do I do with all this money?" stories, he decided to help make the world a better place - specifically by co-founding a charter school in Cleveland. (Read TIME's report: "How to Raise the Standard in America's Schools...
...much greenhouse-gas emissions are generated when forests are converted to crop fields for the production of ethanol and biofuels, which many environmentalists believe do more harm than good. The move helps get these controversial sources of energy counted as renewable, and therefore eligible for the Renewable Energy Standard, which obliges large electricity providers to use at least 20% renewable energy sources...
...long way from that goal (less than 3% of our power comes from non-hydro renewables), and there's growing doubt that even Obama's greener policies can bring us there. The cap-and-trade bill circulating in Congress contains a weak renewable-energy standard -just 20% of U.S. electricity would need to come from renewables by 2020, but that allows for nuclear power, and many utilities would be allowed to escape the requirement altogether. "We're off to a slow start," says Peter Duprey, CEO of Acciona Energy North America, which operates wind, solar and biofuel plants...