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The world has plenty of energy, enough for 500 years and probably 1,000 or
more.
"And that's the bad news. Because it's fossil energy," Nobel laureate
physicist and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory director Steve Chu told
fellow scientists Monday at Stanford University.
Left to their present course, industrialized and developing nations are planning
to burn vast quantities of fossil fuels, driven increasingly to carbon-rich coal
by high oil and gas prices.
China alone is building the equivalent of a Manhattan every year and a large
coal-fired power plant every week. It consumed more coal last year than the
United States, Russia and India combined. "China is a coal economy. You don't
change that overnight," said Doug Ogden, director of the China Sustainable
Energy program for the San Francisco-based Energy Foundation.
That's likely to push the chemistry of the atmosphere past a doubling ...