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　　Europe Finds Clean Energy in Trash, but U.S. Lags
　　By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
　　Published: April 12, 2010
　　HORSHOLM, Denmark — The lawyers and engineers who dwell in an elegant enclavehere are at peace with the hulking neighbor just over the back fence: a vast energy plant that burns thousands of tons of household garbage and industrial waste, round the clock.
　　Far cleaner than conventional incinerators, this new type of plant converts local trash into heat and electricity. Dozens of filters catch pollutants, from mercury to dioxin, that would have emerged from its smokestack only a decade ago.
　　In that time, such plants have become both the mainstay of garbage disposal and a crucial fuel source across Denmark, from wealthy exurbs like Horsholm to Copenhagen’s downtown area. Their use has not only reduced the country’s energy costs and reliance on oil and gas, but also benefited the environment, diminishing the use of landfills and cutting carbon dioxide emissions. The plants run so cleanly that many times more dioxin is now released from home fireplaces and backyard barbecues than from incineration.
　　With all these innovations, Denmark now regards garbage as a clean alternative fuel rather than a smelly, unsightly problem. And the incinerators, known as waste-to-energy plants, have acquired considerable cachet as communities like Horsholm vie to have them built.
　　Denmark now has 29 such plants, serving 98 municipalities in a country of 5.5 million people, and 10 more are planned or under construction. Across Europe, there are about 400 plants, with Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands leading the pack in expanding them and building new ones.
　　By contrast, no new waste-to-energy plants are being planned or built in the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency says — even though the federal government and 24 states now classify waste that is burned this way for energy as a renewable fuel, in many cases eligible for subsidies. There are only 87 trash-burning power plants in the United States, a country of more than 300 million people, and almost all were built at least 15 years ago.
　　Instead, distant landfills remain the end point for most of the nation’s trash. New York City alone sends 10,500 tons of residential waste each day to landfills in places like Ohio and South Carolina.
　　“Europe has gotten out ahead with this newest technology,” said Ian A. Bowles, a former Clinton administration official who is now the Massachusetts state secretary of energy.
　　Still, Mr. Bowles said that as America’s current landfills topped out and pressure to reduce heat-trapping gases grew, Massachusetts and some other states were “actively considering” new waste-to-energy proposals; several existing plants are being expanded. He said he expected resistance all the same in a place where even a wind turbine se ts off protests.
　　Why Americans Are Reluctant
　　Matt Hale, director of the Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, said the reasons that waste-to-energy plants had not caught on nationally were the relative abundance of cheap landfills in a large country, opposition from state officials who feared the plants could undercut recycling programs and a “negative public perception.” In the United States, individual states and municipalities generally decide what method to use to get rid of their waste.
　　阅读第二篇
　　Fluency with information technology (abbreviated as FITness) goes beyond traditional notions of computer literacy. As noted in Chapter 1, literacy about information technology might call for a minimal level of familiarity with technological tools like word processors, e-mail, and Web browsers. By contrast, FITness requires that persons understand information technology broadly enough to be able to apply it productively at work and in their everyday lives, to recognize when information technology would assist or impede the achievement of a goal, and to continually adapt to the changes in and advancement of information technology. FITness therefore requires a deeper, more essential understanding and mastery of information technology for information processing, communication, and problem solving than does computer literacy as traditionally defined. (Box 2.1 addresses the difference between literacy and FITness in more specific terms.) Note also that FITness as described in this chapter builds on many other fundamental competencies, such as textual literacy, logical reasoning, and knowledge of civics and society.
　　Information technology is a medium that permits the expression of a vast array of information, ideas, concepts, and messages, and FITness is about effectively exploiting that expressive power. FITness enables a person to accomplish a variety of different tasks using information technology and to develop different ways of accomplishing a given task.
　　FITness comes in degrees and gradations and is tied to different purposes. FITness is thus not an "end state" that is independent of domain, but rather develops over a lifetime in particular domains of interest involving particular applications. Aspects of FITness can be developed by using spreadsheets for personal or professional budgeting, desktop publishing tools to create or edit documents or Web pages, search engines and database management tools for locating information on the Web or in large databases, and design tools to create visualizations in various scientific and engineering disciplines.
　　The wide variety of contexts in which FITness is relevant is matched by the rapid pace at which information technology evolves. Most professionals today require constant upgrading of technological skills as new tools become useful in their work; they learn new word processing programs, new computer-assisted design environments, or new techniques for searching the World Wide Web. Different applications of information
　　technology emerge rather frequently, both in areas with long traditions of using information and information technology and in areas that are not usually seen as being technology-intensive. Perhaps the major challenge for individuals embarking on the goal of lifelong FITness involves deciding when to learn a new tool, when to change to a new technology, when to devote energy to increasing technological competency, and when to allocate time to other professional activities.
　　The above comments suggest that FITness is personal, graduated, and dynamic. FITness is personal in the sense that individuals evaluate, distinguish, learn, and use new information technology as appropriate to their own sustained personal and professional activities. What is appropriate for an individual depends on the particular applications, activities, and opportunities for FITness that are associated with the individual’s area of interest or specialization, and what is reasonable for a FIT lawyer or a historian to know and be able to do may well differ from what is required for a FIT scientist or engineer. FITness is graduated in the sense that it is characterized by different levels of sophistication (rather than a single FIT / not-FIT judgment), and it is dynamic in that it requires lifelong learning as information technology evolves.

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