Word: less
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...good place to start would be to give albatrosses a future with more food and less plastic trash to swallow. A U.N. marine-pollution treaty makes dumping plastics illegal, but policing at sea is impractical. Nonetheless, ships could be required to carry up-to-date equipment for handling garbage and storing liquid waste that might otherwise be dumped into the water. Routine discharges put more oil into the sea than major spills...
Sunny as the global averages look, however, things get a lot darker when you break them down by region. Even the best family-planning programs do no good if there is neither the money nor governmental expertise to carry them out, and in less-developed countries--which currently account for a staggering 96% of the annual population increase--both are sorely lacking. In parts of the Middle East and Africa, the fertility rate exceeds seven babies per woman. In India, nearly 16 million births are registered each year, for a growth rate of 1.8%. While Europe's population was three...
Third, some good news: we have in hand most of the technologies needed to chart a new course. We know how to use oil, wood, water and other resources much more efficiently than we do now. Increased efficiency--doing more with less--will enable us to use fewer resources and produce less pollution per capita, buying us the time to bring solar power, hydrogen fuel cells and other futuristic technologies on line...
Super-refrigerators use 87% less electricity than older, standard models while costing the same (assuming mass production) and performing better, as Paul Hawken and Amory and L. Hunter Lovins explain in their book Natural Capitalism. In Amsterdam the headquarters of ING Bank, one of Holland's largest banks, uses one-fifth as much energy per square meter as a nearby bank, even though the buildings cost the same to construct. The ING center boasts efficient windows and insulation and a design that enables solar energy to provide much of the building's needs, even in cloudy Northern Europe...
...must not be solely an American project, however. China and India, with their gigantic populations and ambitious development plans, could by themselves doom everyone else to severe global warming. Already, China is the world's second largest producer of greenhouse gases (after the U.S.). But China would use 50% less coal if it simply installed today's energy-efficient technologies. Under the Global Green Deal, Europe, America and Japan would help China buy these technologies, not only because that would reduce global warming but also because it would create jobs and profits for workers and companies back home...