ENERGY: Fiddling Dangerously While Fuel Burns

By night, New York City, Las Vegas, Tokyo and other cities across the industrialized world are a carnival of wastefully blazing lights. In Rome's Villa Borghese park, thousands of street lamps glow wanly in bright morning sunshine. Thermostats are set at stifling levels in many German homes. From Berlin to Osaka, families pile into their cars for weekend pleasure jaunts, clogging highways and creating hellish traffic jams. Just three years after the Arab oil embargo that shook consuming nations and threatened economic disaster, most of the world's consumers seem to have forgotten...

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