Word: hertsgaard
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...story "Will We Run Out Of Gas?" [SPECIAL REPORT, Nov. 8], Mark Hertsgaard presented an encouraging future for our prospects of driving more environmentally friendly automobiles. Hybrid gasoline-electric cars with impressive fuel efficiency are already on our doorstep, and his prediction that hydrogen-powered fuel-cell cars will be in showrooms by 2004 is even more exciting. It is true that their only exhaust is water vapor. However, Hertsgaard seems reluctant to spoil the party by telling us where the hydrogen comes from. It is certainly not out there floating around in large amounts free for the asking. Fuel...
...Mark Hertsgaard's most recent book is Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future
China also lusts after cars, of course, and manufactures and imports as many as possible. Road building in China swallows scarce farmland, and traffic chokes streets and highways. Coal heats the chilly north, generates electricity and fouls the air. To Hertsgaard, big-shot capitalism seems a scourge--though not to the newly prosperous Chinese he meets, who brag that they get used to bad air. This single nation, the author observes, holds veto power over any environmental reforms the rest of the world may choose...
...does the U.S., whose waffling on global warming Hertsgaard notes with contempt. He concludes his book, as is customary, with a spoonful of optimism. The marvelous energy of capitalism, he suggests, could be put to conserving energy. Insulate more; heat and cool less. Build green fridges and cars that run on nonpolluting fuel cells...
Sure. But environmental degradation, which is what Hertsgaard is asking readers to be worried about, is one of those vaguely irritating phrases that sink to the bottom of public discourse and stay there like sludge. The mind's response, after the 20th hearing, is a weary "Yeah, yeah." Got to get the kids off to school. Got to invest in a hog factory, build on a floodplain, send bigger boats after fewer fish. Write a check to Greenpeace. Buy Exxon Mobil. And be sure to pick up some bottled water...