Piled Higher and Deeper

O my little Droogies, the trooth is painful, which is why we must laff at it. Laff laff laff. More to lafff about right here, courtesy of the magazine named (increasingly oxymoronically) Scientific American. Your ever-pessimistic author always on the lookout for the good news in the Decline and Fall of Human Civilization:

• 2,000,000 plastic bottles are discarded in the U.S. every five minutes
• 450 mountaintops have been removed, decapitated, in West Virginia and other southeastern states in the past 3 decades to mine coal.
• "Let this be our national goal: at the end of this decade, in the year 1980, the United States will not be dependent on any other country for the energy we need."
  —President Richard M. Nixon, State of the Union address, January 30, 1974
• If rising carbon dioxide levels increase global temperatures by one degree Celsius, the resulting air pollution could kill an additional 1,000 people in the U.S. and 20,000 people worldwide each year.
• Of the European Union, Japan, China, Australia, Canada and the US, the United States is dead last in fuel efficiency. (China beats us in fuel efficiency — gotta luv it.)