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"President Barack Obama required federal agencies on Friday to present plans to combat climate change. An executive order mandated steps to make it easier for communities "to strengthen their resilience to extreme weather and prepare for other impacts of climate change," according to a White House statement. It also creates an interagency Council on Climate Preparedness and Resilience, charged with overseeing federal efforts at fighting climate change."

"Global warming has propelled Earth's climate from one of its coldest decades since the last ice age to one of its hottest -- in just one century. A heat spike like this has never happened before, at least not in the last 11,300 years, said climatologist Shaun Marcott, who worked on a new study on global temperatures going back that far."

Finding creative solutions to energy issues has become a major priority for Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page in recent years. For the obvious reasons -- a growing population, increasingly scarce resources, and climate change -- he believes that the corporate world needs to operate more sustainably, and he is determined to build the nation's first zero-carbon company. This means a business that ultimately is so energy efficient and uses so much clean power that it emits no greenhouse gas -- a very tall order indeed. Experts aren't sure whether it's even possible for a company to emit no carbon, but Google is trying to come as close to that goal as possible. "As we became a bigger user of energy, we wanted to make sure we were not just part of the problem, but part of the solution," says Urs Hölzle, Google's employee No. 8 and a senior vice president who oversees the company's green initiatives.