Free Republic

Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid. In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently. Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent...

Revealed: how the smoke stacks of America have brought the world's worst drought to Africa By Charles Arthur Technology Editor 13 June 2002 To those who live there, it is as if the rich have stolen the rain. For more than 30 years, the Sahel region of Africa has suffered the longest sustained droughts in the world. In some places, rainfall has fallen by between 20 and 50 per cent. As a consequence, crops have failed on a huge scale; in the worst years, between 1972 and 1975 and between 1984 and 1985, up to a million people starved to...