Word: effectiveness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Music Therapy? It was remarkable that there was so much hoopla over whether this one visit by the New York Philharmonic could somehow have a lasting effect on relations between North Korea and the civilized world [March 10]. This flies in the face of the Bard's admonition to remember that what's past is prologue. Not quite four decades ago, the U.S. table-tennis team ping-ponged to Beijing, opening the door for Nixon to play the "China card" against the Soviets, but that only led to nearly two decades of détente. The only effective...
...Wrongs? It seems foolhardy and arrogant to push forward with geoengineering processes that would result in alterations of climatic and marine systems [March 24]. Instead of seeking ways to mitigate the effect of greenhouse gases, policymakers should attack the problem head-on by regulating industry. The solution to global warming is to stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Anything short of this will ultimately fail. Alan Foreman, Cambridge, Massachusetts...
...reduced fertilizer use while increasing yields, and they convert leftover biomass into electricity. Marcos Jank, the head of their trade group, urges me not to lump biofuels together: "Grain is good for bread, not for cars. But sugar is different." Jank expects production to double by 2015 with little effect on the Amazon. "You'll see the expansion on cattle pastures and the Cerrado," he says...
...environmental cost of this cropland creep is now becoming apparent. One groundbreaking new study in Science concluded that when this deforestation effect is taken into account, corn ethanol and soy biodiesel produce about twice the emissions of gasoline. Sugarcane ethanol is much cleaner, and biofuels created from waste products that don't gobble up land have real potential, but even cellulosic ethanol increases overall emissions when its plant source is grown on good cropland. "People don't want to believe renewable fuels could be bad," says the lead author, Tim Searchinger, a Princeton scholar and former Environmental Defense attorney...
Several of the most widely cited experts on the environmental benefits of biofuels are warning about the environmental costs now that they've recognized the deforestation effect. "The situation is a lot more challenging than a lot of us thought," says University of California, Berkeley, professor Alexander Farrell, whose 2006 Science article calculating the emissions reductions of various ethanols used to be considered the definitive analysis. The experts haven't given up on biofuels; they're calling for better biofuels that won't trigger massive carbon releases by displacing wildland. Robert Watson, the top scientist at the U.K.'s Department...