Word: hydrocarbons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this big, messy, off-and-on brilliant novel, Powers tends to go for flash. He sets off skyrockets, then more skyrockets. Great, arcing bursts of language streak across not just pages but whole chapters. (On pollution: "Maroon-brown patinas of condensing air . . . the noxious residue, the breakdown skeins of hydrocarbon linkages . . .") Then, before the afterimage can fade, the bedazzled firmament detonates again in grander, wilder colors. Great stuff, the reader thinks, and does anyone have an aspirin...
...breaking down. Several large colonies of murres, a seabird, have not produced any chicks in the years since the spill. Harlequin ducks, black oyster catchers and other animals have been contaminated by eating oil-drenched mussels, and sea-otter populations are hemorrhaging, literally and figuratively -- a side effect of hydrocarbon poisoning...
...bulky and dirty. Sulfur oxides (SOx) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) have been indicted as principal villains in the formation of acid rain. More than half the nation's electricity is produced by power plants that burn coal. By running finely ground coal through a chemical bath (currently pentane, a hydrocarbon similar to butane), the Otisca process separates out all but 1% of the mineral content, or ash, and 0.5% of the sulfur that forms sulfur oxides when it burns. Because it is half water, Otisca Fuel produces a cooler flame than straight coal does and hence about half the nitrogen...