Word: used
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...other top predators that need space as well. Tigers and panthers are being squeezed out and may not last the coming century. We, at least, have the flexibility--the omnivorous stomach and creative brain--to adapt. We can do it by moving down the food chain: eating foods that use less water and land, and that pollute far less, than cows and pigs do. In the long run, we can lose our memory of eating animals, and we will discover the intrinsic satisfactions of a diverse plant-based diet, as millions of people already have...
Cost is also an issue. Managed-care providers, eager to cash in on the alternative boom, are luring subscribers by offering to cover some of these dubious treatments. But most consumers of alternate products use conventional medicine too, and when it becomes evident that the alternatives are not cost effective and at best produce only a placebo effect, the HMOs will drop them in a heartbeat. Says William Jarvis, a professor of public health at California's Loma Linda University: "Useless procedures don't add to the outcome, just to the overhead...
...that unfortunate? After all, these fuels provide nearly 80% of the energy humans use to keep warm, to light buildings and run computers, to power the cars that get us around, the tractors that plant food, the hospitals that serve our sick. If these fuels were to vanish tomorrow, worldwide chaos would follow and humans would die in the hundreds of millions...
China could use 50% less energy if it only installed more efficient electric lights, motors and insulation, all technologies currently available on the world market. Americans could trade in their notoriously gas-swilling SUVs for sporty new 80-m.p.g. hybrid-electric cars. Better yet: hydrogen-powered fuel-cell cars, expected in showrooms by 2004. Since their only exhaust is water vapor, fuel-cell cars produce neither smog nor global warming...
...less profligate future in Kalundborg, Denmark. There, an unusual place called an "eco-industrial park" shows how much can be gained by recycling and resource sharing. Within the park, a power company, a pharmaceuticals firm, a wallboard producer and an oil refinery share in the production and use of steam, gas and cooling water. Excess heat warms nearby homes and agricultural greenhouses. One company's waste becomes another's resource. The power plant, for example, sells the sulfur dioxide it scrubs from its smokestacks to the wallboard company, which uses the compound as a raw material. Dozens of these...