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TODAY Wednesday 16 April 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD

The good news is that Coca-Cola had a great first quarter. Everybody expected strong growth in overseas sales (China up 19% over a year ago, Spain 18%), but it the was the big spurt in domestic revenues that caught the experts off guard. "An extraordinarily strong performance," said the beverage specialist at Paine Webber, "more growth than any soft drink company has had here for many a year." Case volume grew nine percent in the US.

Leader of the surge was double-digit growth in sales from convenience stores and gas stations. "Coke is getting stronger and stronger in the so-called cold-drink channel," the Paine Webber man said.

I've been swimming in that channel recently, particularly in the tributaries that flow through gas stations on the Merrit Parkway in Connecticut. Maybe you haven't noticed, but they've made it a whole lot easier these days to take pit stops. Pull in, swipe the card, pump the gas, visit the john, and then...

And then you're walking from the restroom back out to the car, and you pass through a corridor of snacks on the left and drinks on the right and candy bars dead ahead by the register. Diet Coke, Dr. Pepper, some Nestea concoction, I don't know, but I'll grab something. (Since all are owned by the same company, the economic irrelevance of my choice makes the whole exercise seem more personalized, aesthetic.) I buy a 20 oz. bottle.

Hop back in the car, deploy the built-in cup-holder, and off we go.

I don't like a lot of this. Nobody to wipe the windshield, check tires, make small talk. The spurious choices offered by global markets. The fact that I've fashioned a life where I actually need to be on the Merrit Parkway twice a week. But it's fast, this new system, and the cars go longer without tune-ups and the tires need less checking and the radiators don't boil over nearly so much, so who needs friendly guys in bow ties anyway? And you can buy snacks.

The truth is that America makes driving necessary and sometimes even makes it efficient and attractive. And the truth also is that driving a car occasions more environmental harm than anything else you are likely to do in the course of your life. Climate change, air pollution, water pollution, habitat loss -- name a problem and cars top the list of likely suspects. Enviros who drive 10,000 miles a year and then lecture people about recycling give hypocrisy a bad name.

Since we are almost all of us complicit in this circle of appetite and harm, we make sure that the government socializes the process. You often hear Amtrak subsidies described as if they're some kind of collectivist anachronism, but don't forget that we're all socialists when it comes to building and maintaining highways and funding state troopers and maintaining emergency rooms for the crash victims. Even at the federal level, government spending on roads is exceeded only by defense, Social Security and Medicare. We lavishly subsidize the private automobile, with no murmurs from the American Enterprise Institute. Socialize the roads, socialize (or at least distribute) the harm done by car travel, and make life a little easier for me and the shareholders of the Coca-Cola Company.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

We don't have much of a climate, they say in the west of Ireland, but there's certainly some formidable weather around here. Weather is what we live through and chat about, with intimates and strangers. Weather is surely the most discussed of all environmental topics, something enviros can talk about with our neighbors without seeming unworldly or obsessive.

But obsessed we are, to judge by this Website. Our particular obsession is a twist on Mark Twain's remark to the effect that everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it. The evidence seem clear that these days people are doing something about it, just inadvertently. Humans are changing climate and thereby tomorrow's weather. Climate change is no (you'll excuse the expression) hot button issue for the general public, but it's an intriguingly common concern of the many branches of the environmental movement. There was an outburst of interest in the late 1980s when the global warming hypothesis was first publicized, and now, it seems, it's back. We're all asking: How? When? How much? Where? To what effect? What does it mean? What do we do now?

It's so fundamental, so hugely influential, this climate question. Whether your passion is forests or prairies or human health, you come up against it pretty quickly. So we editors shouldn't have been surprised that so many of the contributors to this first issue wanted to talk about the weather. We had to turn down a number, as a matter of fact. There's a lot left. In the Newsroom, Bill McKibben says climate is the biggest issue of them all, bar none. Marty Strange tells a story about hog manure that ends up (among other things) as a story about greenhouse emissions. The High Fives are peppered with climate anxieties. And we at the home office did our part by assigning a chunk of the In The Trenches section to climate change; reporter Leonie Haimson did the rest by turning in a rich collection of information and insight on all matter of things climatic.

Maybe it's something in the air. Spring? Well, this is our Opening Day at Liberty Tree and we feel some rookie jitters. Maybe you could help us out by spotting our mistakes: errors of fact or attribution; errors of grammar, spelling, punctuation; artistic blunders. We know that not everything is up that we want posted, nor all working so well as we would like them to be working. But it's a start. Let's go, then. Rip out that astroturf, loosen up the arm, try a few throws from the outfield. Play Ball!

-- New York, 16 April 97, 08:30