Texas view on environment is 18 lanes wide

HOUSTON (Reuters) – As
President Bush readies a new plan on global warming, environmentalists say an 18-lane highway going up in Houston speaks volumes about how people in his home state of Texas view the planet.

Between 2003 and 2009, $2.7 billion of state and federal money will have been plowed into expanding 23 miles of Interstate-10 in west Houston to as wide as 18 lanes in some stretches of the city’s main east-west road.

“It is a concrete monstrosity,” said Jim Blackburn, an environmental lawyer in the Texas city who fought the expansion of “I-10″ and lost. “It probably shows as much as anything the philosophy of development here.”

In his annual State of the Union speech to Congress on Tuesday, Bush is expected to call for a massive increase in the use of ethanol — a fuel made from corn and other farm products — to try to reduce U.S. dependency on oil imports.

Environmentalists say more often he is on the wrong track.

Reuters