18 Lane Highways

Reuters opens this piece on an 18 lane highway in Texas with this question, what does this say about Texans' view of the environment:

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."

It probably shows that Texans think that there's plenty of environment to go around. Which, if you lived in Texas, you would probably believe too. There's huge areas of it that are nothing, where a highway greatly improves the scenery.