Word: scale
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Ideally, the hydrogen would be produced sustainably with renewable electricity from the sun or wind. But even under the most optimistic predictions for improvements in renewable technology, the electricity required to split H2O into H and O would be prohibitively expensive. So the first large-scale plants will probably wrest hydrogen from old-fashioned fossil fuels...
...Fish farming--aquaculture--doesn't take pressure off wild fish. Many farms use large numbers of cheap, wild-caught fish as feed to raise fewer shrimp and fish of more lucrative varieties. And industrial-scale fish- and shrimp-aquaculture operations sometimes damage the coastlines where the facilities are located. The farms can foul the water, destroy mangroves and marshes, drive local fishers out of business and serve as breeding grounds for fish diseases. In places such as Bangladesh, Thailand and India, which grow shrimp mainly for export to richer countries, diseases and pollution usually limit a farm's life...
...sticker title Small Is Beautiful became an eco-bible (worldwide sales: 4 million copies). Urging the West not to foist fuel-gulping technologies on poor nations, he instead favored "appropriate" solutions--oxen, say, rather than job-eliminating tractors. In posthumous tribute, even the World Bank now agrees that small-scale aid projects, relying mainly on the people themselves, are indeed beautiful...
Suddenly humans had a planet to tend to. Planet-scale perspective on atmospheric health, ocean health and stable climate made strictly national approaches obsolete. Environmental nongovernmental organizations bloomed to set in motion mechanisms for emerging global governance...
...population could be dealt with only in terms of multiple decades, even multiple centuries. Governments limited to next-election thinking had no way to grasp environmental issues. Corporations limited to next-quarter perspective were similarly blinded. Both blundered environmentally because they could not operate on a planetary time scale. Ecological problems were thought unsolvable because they could not be solved in a year...