ESPN.com - Page2 - Election difficulty

From the above article:

Next Week's Environmental Heroes Set Fire to the Rainforest to Use the Light to Search for Recyclable Cans:

TMQ opened his Washington Post to this praiseful article about a husband-wife team of pilots who are methodically flying around the San Francisco area, taking digital photographs of every inch of coastline and posting them on the web. Supposedly, the purpose of this project is to allow average citizens to monitor the coastline for environmental abuses, such as an unauthorized bulldozer. Activists are saying what a fabulous advance the photos are, and privacy concerns seem not to matter -- if you had a home on the California coastline, would you want high-resolution digital photographs of yourself in the backyard posted on the Web?

But what made TMQ spit out his coffee was how the husband-wife team of pilots/ environmental heroes is accomplishing its save-the-planet project -- by flying around in a helicopter. No human construction wastes fossil fuels faster than helicopters, which use power to compensate for poor lift. A typical four-person helicopter, the Bell JetRanger 206, burns 25 gallons of fuel per hour. In an hour of highway operation, a typical large SUV will burn three gallons of fuel. So the husband-wife team of environmental heroes is essentially flying around northern California in eight SUVs strapped together, madly expending fossil fuels and pumping out greenhouse gases. To top it off, helicopter engines are totally unrestricted when it comes to smog-forming emissions. A JetRanger or similar helicopter would spew thousands of times as much smog-forming compounds, per hour of operation, as any make or model of modern car. But they're environmental heroes because they are looking for bulldozers!