Word: likely
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Because of its prestige, the U.S. has the potential to do enormous good in promoting international treaties to heal the planet. Agreements like the 1987 Montreal Protocol, governing the release of ozone-damaging gases, serve the important function of reassuring nations that protecting the environment will not put them at a competitive disadvantage. So far, though, the Bush Administration has squandered the momentum generated by the Montreal agreement. Administration negotiators outraged nations in Africa, a prime dumping ground for hazardous wastes, by opposing important safety provisions in an international agreement on the shipment of toxic refuse...
Such precedents are not encouraging if the U.S. is to grapple with global warming, the climate change that might follow from overloading the atmosphere with gases like carbon dioxide. To date the Administration has been slow to react to the greenhouse threat because scientists are still debating how serious the problem is and because taking strong steps against it could cause severe economic dislocations. The U.N. is sponsoring a major study that could provide the basis for a coordinated international approach to global warming. American leadership is critical to this effort, just as it was to the Montreal Protocol...
...begin setting up a program to tax the use of all fossil fuels. The size of the tax should vary according to how much carbon is released into the atmosphere when a particular fuel is burned. That would encourage a shift in consumption patterns away from high-pollution fuels like coal to cleaner ones like natural...
Some playwrights, like Shel Silverstein in The Devil and Billy Markham, presume that Mr. Scratch has nothing to teach mankind: the sensible response is to spot the fiend's tricks and escape perdition. Other dramatists, like David Mamet in Bobby Gould in Hell, recall that Beelzebub is a fallen angel and reckon he must be something of a moral philosopher. Both authors seem to think nothing could be more instructive than a sojourn in Hades to enhance the remainder of a life back on earth. They give that opportunity not only to the title characters of their...
These developments -- and the gleeful speed with which Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia have guillotined the Communist monopoly -- must make Mikhail Gorbachev feel like the sorcerer's apprentice. Unable to control the rising flood of reforms he has conjured up, he is finding it harder to keep afloat...