Word: traffics
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...home truth that's easily forgotten in the Y2K-inspired pessimism over the prospect of malfunctioning modems, randomly strobing traffic lights and zero-balance money-market accounts is that one person's darkest nightmare is quite often another's dream come true. In rural Montana, where, it seems fair to speculate, more people know how to gather firewood than download a video image from the Web, the prospect of a massive high-tech meltdown is not only nothing to panic over but also, for a lot of folks, something to be welcomed...
...from their home in Sudan by drought and war, and these are ancient, traditional plagues, not modern inventions. It is in Bangkok, strangely enough, that the message of Hertsgaard's journeying begins to strike home. This sprawling river city is like most others--mad about cars, paralyzed by car traffic, its air made unbreathable by cars and its municipal life dying of cars. If this were all, the moral would be simple: avoid Bangkok. Yet cars there, and across Europe and especially in the U.S., are efficient carbon generators. And carbon dioxide is the main ingredient in the greenhouse shield...
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...
...headed straight for a weather pattern that could spell serious trouble for the helium-and-hot-air craft, just as it did for team member Steve Fossett, who fell thousands of feet and was nearly killed by a storm in the South Pacific during his last ballooning attempt. Shipping traffic gets pretty sparse in the vast reaches of the Pacific, and no one wants to find out how long it would take to be rescued. But if current conditions prevail for the next 12 to 24 hours, everything should be fine, according to the crew. One Donovan song they...
Legitimate concerns, but guess what, guys? Air-traffic control is complicated. So is gene splicing. But reviewing a 5-yd. run on instant replay? Is there any good reason, with a game on the line, a season on the line, maybe the Super Bowl on the line, that everyone but the referees should have the benefit of technology that's roughly 35 years...