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The New York Times
OPINION
You Must Remember
This
By WILLIAM FALK,
Op-Ed Contributor nytimes.com on the Web, December 30, 2007
IT was a year of miraculous events.
President Bush invited Al Gore to the Oval Office for a friendly chat about
global warming. France elected a president who likes and admires
Americans. Eliot Spitzer discovered the virtue of humility. In
mid-rant, Hugo Chávez was finally told to shut up. The cute little
Canadian dollar — the “loonie” — became worth more than a greenback.
People rooted for Kevin Federline to get the kids. After electing 43
consecutive white male presidents, Americans seriously considered a woman, a
black man and an Italian-American from New York on his third marriage.
Amid such strange occurrences, one could be excused for missing news of more
subtle — but lasting — importance. Here are a few developments you haven’t
heard the last of:
HOW DRY WE ARE One of the consequences of global warming for the United States,
climatologists warn, will be prolonged droughts. This summer, more than 40
percent of the country found itself in the grip of “extreme or moderate”
drought. In the Southwest, seven years of rainless skies and warmer
temperatures left the Rockies without much snow pack, and created alarming
bathtub rings around the Lake Mead and Lake Powell reservoirs.
In the Southeast, a drought of a severity not seen in more than a century
destroyed crops and turned rivers and lakes to dust in several states; Atlanta’s
primary source of drinking water, Lake Lanier, fell to a record low, setting off
a water war between Florida and Alabama. Things got so bad that Gov. Sonny
Perdue of Georgia staged a prayer ceremony. “God, we need you,” he
beseeched the heavens. “We do believe in miracles.” The heavens have
yet to respond.
NOT-SO-BENIGN NEGLECT After a 40-year-old highway bridge in Minneapolis
collapsed on Aug. 1, dropping 50 cars and trucks into the abyss and killing 13
people, the public was surprised to learn that engineers had given 74,000 other
bridges in the United States the same rating as the fallen span:
“structurally deficient.” Engineers and state officials clamored for
repairs to these aging bridges, but estimates of the total cost were as high as
$188 billion. Representative Jim Oberstar, Democrat of Minnesota, proposed
a temporary five-cent gas tax to pay for the repairs, but his legislative
colleagues argued that Congress and the states simply had to spend existing
highway funds more wisely, instead of wasting them on earmarks for pet projects.
Instead, Congress allocated $1 billion to inspect and repair deficient bridges,
about $13,500 per bridge.
In the same bill that established the bridge fund, Congress voted to spend $7.4
billion on such earmarks as a National First Ladies’ Library in Canton, Ohio; a
project to improve “rural domestic preparedness” in Kentucky; and a high-speed
ferry to the remote Matanuska-Susitna Borough in Alaska.
GAY PRAIRIE Culture warriors may be fighting over gay marriage, but
acceptance of gays and lesbians is growing even in the most conservative states.
The gay population of Nebraska jumped 71 percent from 2000 to 2005, according to
a new analysis of Census Bureau statistics. In Kansas, the number of
people who said they were gay rose 68 percent. In Iowa, the increase was
58 percent.
It’s not that more people are gay, or that there’s been a huge migration of gays
from San Francisco and New York to the Farm Belt, demographers say. Gay
people are simply “coming out” in places where they once hid or fled.
BUILDING WALLS, NOT BRIDGES As presidential candidates vow “to secure the
border,” the Department of Homeland Security has already started work on a
700-mile “wall” along the 1,952-mile Mexican border. Half of the new wall,
extending from Tecate, Calif., to Laredo, Tex., will consist of barriers like
15-foot-high fences made of sheet metal and solid concrete. For about 150
miles in the remote desert, the border will be guarded by a high-tech “fence” of
cameras, light towers, underground sensors and radar.
The biggest opposition so far has come from local ranchers and farmers, who say
the fence is cutting off parts of their land and blocking access to the Rio
Grande. Homeland Security officials say they’ll try to accommodate local
concerns, but that national security trumps property rights.
SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM Four years ago, Bill Gates of Microsoft predicted
that the problem of unsolicited commercial e-mail, or spam, “will be solved by
2006.” It wasn’t. Spammers, in fact, figured out several ways to
evade anti-spam software and other efforts to stop them, and are now sending out
close to 200 billion messages a day. About 70 percent of all e-mail is now
spam. In weary resignation, the average Internet user spends three minutes
a day hitting the delete button on the scores of spam messages that evade the
filters.
EXPORTING THE CAR CULTURE In the West, “going green” may be all the rage,
but in China and India, the automobile is being discovered all over again.
The two countries each have populations of more than a billion, booming
economies and rapidly expanding middle classes, and an unsated appetite for
Western goodies — including cars. In India, Tata Motors is introducing the
People’s Car, with a sticker price of $2,500. Over the next 12 years, some
economists predict, more than 150 million Indians will buy cars. China,
meanwhile, may have 140 million cars on its roads by 2020.
If this all comes to pass, climate experts say, it will be impossible to make
meaningful, worldwide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. China and
India already account for 70 percent of the worldwide increase in energy demand
over the last two years. “This is a very worrying message,” said Fatih
Birol, chief economist for the International Energy Agency, which provides
policy advice to industrialized nations. “China and India are transforming
our energy markets. We have a window of opportunity of 5 to 10 years
before it becomes unsustainable and irreversible.” In other words, get
used to praying for rain.
William Falk is the editor in chief of The Week magazine.
Posted 12-27-07
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