This is a guest post by my friend Sean Sakamoto, who blogs at www.idratherbe.tv/injapan. “It’s so weird that you heat your whole house,” my wife said one winter. She’s Japanese, and when we first got married, here in the United States, we got a lot of mileage out of the “I can’t believe you people […]
carbon emissions
America’s love affair with the car more of a forced marriage?
From a post by Harvey Wasserman on CommonDreams.org: In a 1922 memo that will live in infamy, GM President Alfred P. Sloan established a unit aimed at dumping electrified mass transit in favor of gas-burning cars, trucks and buses. Just one American family in 10 then owned an automobile. Instead, we loved our 44,000 miles of passenger rail […]
Sad pictures of dead bicyclists that I plan to show the Senator
So, New York State Senator Klein and I have rearranged our meeting to discuss bicycling and transportation policy in New York City for this coming Tuesday, October 14. You may remember that the Senator and I had an altercation (read here, here and here) after he nearly veered his black Mercedes into me when I […]
How to live a $4 a gallon lifestyle in the coming $5 a gallon world
First, a bit of business. I wanted to let those of you who subscribe to the blog by email or RSS reader know that we have a very active and interesting commenting community. You may want to come have a look, either to leave comments of your own or simply to read the informative comments […]
LV GRN: Making summer vacation choices
In the two summers before the No Impact experiment, we went to France and Italy for three weeks each. We rented cars and had the time of our lives. This year, though the No Impact year is over, we’re continuing to make what, for me, is the difficult decision of keeping it closer to home. […]
LV GRN: Why recycling is nowhere near enough
People used to to ask me, essentially, why I was making such a big dig about not making trash during the No Impact project. They’d say, “I mean, it’s recyclable, right?” As Annie Leonard says in Story of Stuff, “Recycling reduces the garbage at [the landfill and incinerator] end and it reduces the pressure to […]
Sustainable development vs reducing consumption
Michael Shellenberger of The Breakthrough Institute sent me a post from his blog that is written by Siddhartha Shome and starts like this: Car A gets a fuel efficiency of 46 miles per gallon. Car B gets about 50 miles per gallon. Car A is called the Toyota Prius and is hailed by environmentalists as a step […]
A good natured tiff with an environmental big wig
A few weeks back I was noodling around the internet and I came across The Breakthrough Institute, started by Michael Shellenberger (pictured here) and Ted Nordhaus, the authors of the controversial book Break Through: The Death of Environmentalism and the Politics of Possibility, which I admire and have discussed before. I zapped off an email, […]