Word: toxicants
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George Bush was under fire as "the environmentalist" President in campaign pledge only. But last week he managed to confound his critics. He broke a decade-long impasse by proposing major steps to reduce acid rain, smog caused by auto exhaust and toxic chemicals discharged into the air. In a political tour de force, he managed to draw at least grudging acceptance from almost all sides. Environmentalists were pleased that the plan met their minimum goals. Industry grumbled about heavy costs: $14 billion to $19 billion annually by the end of the year 2000. But utility executives sighed with relief...
More important, the plan might actually lead to more breathable air. It calls for a 50% slash in acid-rain-producing sulfur-dioxide emissions by the turn of the century, a 40% tightening of emissions standards for hydrocarbons from automobile tail pipes, a 75% cut in cancer-causing toxic chemicals poured into the atmosphere over an unspecified period, and in its most visionary -- perhaps pie-in-the-sky -- aspect, a fleet of cars that run on fuels cleaner than gasoline (probably methanol, though ethanol or compressed natural gas could also be used). Some 500,000 such cars would...
Inconsistencies abound. The Joker falls into a vat of toxic slime that eats the skin off his body but doesn't damage his signature deck of cards; when he gaily vandalizes some classic paintings, the film spells the museum's name two different ways; and when he starts tossing $20 million in cash onto the street, the good people of Gotham don't go into a looting frenzy and attack his perch. More important, the picture's first hour poses one big question: How will ace photographer Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger) react when she learns that Bruce is Batman...
...Hamm's scenario, Batman interrupts a Napier heist and allows the crook to fall into a vat of toxic waste. Jack emerges as the Joker and leads a crime wave, concocting a formula to be injected into cosmetics that twists the victim's face into the Joker's awful leer. Soon Gotham is a city of the grinning dead, and only Batman can revive it, with the help of Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger), frontline photojournalist and all-time fabulous babe...
Movies and TV movies will also stoke awareness. The Keep, a TV movie about global warming set 50 to 75 years in the future, may air later this year; TNT will broadcast Incident at Dark River, about a father who learns that toxic dumping has killed his child. When writer-director David Zucker (Airplane!) % visited a solar-power plant in the Mojave Desert, he was inspired to drop a message into his script for The Naked Gun II. "A love affair is like the ozone layer," says Lieut. Frank Drebin. "You only miss it when it's gone...