Answer: No.

Okay, that was too easy. The Stockholm Environment Institute and the Tufts Climate Initiative have a handout with travel tips for cutting your air travel carbon footprint, and fortunately it's a bit longer than a single page with DON'T printed in giant letters. (Though, "If you have a choice, don’t travel" is their first tip.)

They also include a decent guide for choosing who to buy carbon offsets from. Some airlines, like EasyJet, allow you to buy offsets online at the same time you purchase your ticket. This is certainly a good start, though I'd ask why make it optional? Travelers accepted the 9/11 security fee automatically added to their ticket fare, so why not a mandatory carbon offset fee?

Well, until that happens, here's a reminder to offset every flight and fly direct whenever possible.

[Via Gristmill]

Tags: Air travel, Offsets.

Email it Permalink 0 comments Add a comment

Crunchy Chicken makes the case that eating out may be more eco-friendly than cooking at home. It's a counter-intuitive argument to be sure, but it comes down to the idea that taking advantage of economies of scale can save energy. Much like how sharing a giant diesel smoking bus with dozens of other people reduces your carbon footprint compared to driving separate clean burning cars over the same distance.

Another example that comes to mind is computing power. Does your average email and web user really need an energy sucking supercomputer sitting under their desk, or would a low powered computer running web applications (like Gmail) hosted on a finely tuned datacenter serve the same needs? I'm looking around my house to see what else could be offloaded, and it's an interesting lens to view everything through. Are we better off making every individual unit of consumption as efficient as possible, or should we move away from individual consumption and towards shared infrastructure?

Tags: Conservation, Infrastructure.

Email it Permalink 0 comments Add a comment

One of the major criticisms of John McCain's recent Financial Times op-ed that's been flying around has been his call to "reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources" with nuclear energy. "Foreign energy sources", of course, is just another way of saying oil, and only about 2% of our electricity is generated by oil. So more nuclear doesn't really help us replace oil. Right?

Well, maybe not. There is a kernel of unintentional truth here. While there are definitely problems with nuclear (cost, storage, and the difficulty of convincing communities to allow a power plant nearby), electricity can and probably will replace oil for transportation, especially once electric cars and plug-in electrics are widespread. At that point it doesn't matter if the energy source is coal or nuclear or wind. In the best case scenario, electric cars could be charged without increasing demand for electricity, and in the worst case, we could still recharge them using electricity generated without CO2. With biofuels losing favor and every car manufacturer picking up renewed interest in electrics and plug-in electrics, replacing gasoline with electricity seems like a safe bet. (And certainly much more feasible than a sci-fi hydrogen economy.)

The caveat here is "once electric cars and plug-in electrics are widespread", and the key to getting there will be for government to mandate electric and plug-in electric cars. John McCain isn't going to do that. But in the meantime, it's probably a good idea to rethink how we look at energy replacements. Energy is energy, whether it comes from coal or nuclear or wind or oil.

Tags: Global warming, Nuclear, Cars.

Email it Permalink 2 comments Add a comment

I'm just not seeing it. Al Gore recently came out in favor of a carbon tax, presumably over cap-and-trade. The two schemes are essentially in competition with each other, so supporting one often means opposing the other. And while I'm sure Al Gore would be happy to see any solution get implemented, I'm left wondering why he chose to throw his weight behind the lesser of the two.

At this point it's pretty clear that we're going to get one or the other, and which one we should end up with is the subject of intense debate. But at the moment, all signs point to cap-and-trade being the superior and more politically acceptable plan. With both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton supporting aggressive cap-and-trade plans and the Senate already debating a cap-and-trade plan of their own, it looks like we could have it if we wanted it.

But a carbon tax would be a mistake. Instead of fixing the problem at the source by directly changing industry, we'd have "personal responsibility" with a cattle prod.

READ MORE

Tags: Carbon tax, Cap-and-trade.

Email it Permalink 2 comments Add a comment

Hillary Clinton talks about coal on a West Virginia Public Radio interview yesterday. I wish I were making this up:

You know, maybe there is a way to recover those mountaintops once they have been stripped of the coal. You know, I think we’ve got to look at this from a practical perspective.

The underlying attitude here is deeply disturbing. Either she really believes that you really can "undo" environmental destruction (essentially thinking you can uncrack an egg by wishing it so), or she knows it's a disaster and she doesn't care.

Either way, this interview should be considered her coming out party as an adversary of the green economy. What she's really saying is that we're going to keep destroying land and destroying communities, using the false threat of losing jobs to justify corporate handouts, rather than ending these practices and creating millions of new jobs by building a clean energy economy.

Even Obama, who comes from a coal producing state, has made it clear that if we are going to use coal, we need to stop blowing the tops off of mountains to get it.

And speaking of Obama, isn't there an election coming up in Pennsylvania? I'm wondering if the people living here:



are keen to go the way of West Virginia.

Tags: Green economy, Coal.

Email it Permalink 0 comments Add a comment

Kevin Doyle at Gristmill continues with the second part of his review of the Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference that took place last week in Pittsburgh. While the phrase "green jobs" makes intuitive sense, it can be a bit ambiguous to anyone not following developments in clean energy, and his review spells out quite clearly what those kinds of jobs will look like. It's definitely a good one to send off to anyone skeptical of yet another media hyped new economy.

Like this comment over on Gristmill:

What about an almost middle-aged person locked in a dead-end, potentially environmentally destructive job, who has to continue to work full-time to pay their bills and might have already dipped into their savings to survive substantial reductions in income and unexpected expenses? How does such a person find and prepare for a role in the new sparkling green economy?

I don't consider selling the house and jetting off to the next green economic boom town a viable option. That's the sort of behavior that has been destabilizing communities for decades.

This is definitely a concern, though I would counter that the housing bust is destabilizing communities pretty well on its own. Why not give all these people who are already in transition the skills to help build the green economy?

Tags: Green collar jobs.

Email it Permalink 0 comments Add a comment

It's looking more and more like Obama will be the first president committed to taking decisive environmental action. Today is the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, and in his speech today on foreign policy, he included global warming as a critical national security issue that will be addressed by his administration. From the full transcript:

Here are just five ways in which a shift in strategy away from Iraq will help us address the critical challenges of the 21st century.

...

Fourth, the catastrophic consequences of the global climate crisis are matched by the promise of collective action. Now is the time for America to lead, because if we take action, others will act as well. Through our own cap and trade system and investments in new sources of energy, we can end our dependence on foreign oil and gas, and free ourselves from the tyranny of oil-rich states from Saudi Arabia to Russia to Venezuela. We can create millions of new jobs here in America. And we can secure our planet for our children and grandchildren.

He is, of course, 100% right, and action on climate change as national security isn't an entirely new idea. Thomas Friedman proposed a "geo-green" strategy for using renewable energy to tear down totalitarian regimes in the Middle East, and even those dirty hippies at the Pentagon have been preparing contingencies for a world wracked by boiled earth chaos.

But other than the usual chorus of "we must sign Kyoto so other countries will like us again", this could be the first major opportunity for global warming to break out as a serious foreign policy issue, a new kind of "commander-in-chief threshold". If a presidential candidate is unable to tackle global warming in a substantial way, how can he or she possibly be considered anything other than weak on national security?

Tags: Global warming, Foreign policy.

Email it Permalink 0 comments Add a comment

America's Next Top Model might be proud of their newly minted green cred, but last episode's slaughterhouse photoshoot (complete with hanging carcasses) goes beyond missing the point. Scroll down for the full horror of the screen grabs.

I really can't think of anything less green than growing cows as temporary fashion, but it's hard not to be amused by their bad timing. Doesn't anyone over there read the news?

Tags: Media, Meat industry, Fashion.

Email it Permalink 1 comment Add a comment

It's almost hard to believe that environmentalism is where it is today. There's no doubt that it's received a full facelift after being wrestled from the hippy culture of the 1970s, even down to rebranding "environmentalism" as "green". I don't think anyone could have ever predicted that giant corporations like Walmart would even entertain talk of changing what they sell and how they do business.

So it's a kind of unfortunate irony that, while capitalists are starting to make the connection between going green and making green, there's a growing rift between the working class and "environmental elites". What started as a left wing movement is now in a position of having to win over the political left.

Which is why the work Van Jones is doing is so important. In an interview with The Sun, he talks about the need to find solutions that solve global problems, without forcing people into the impossible dilemma of feeding themselves or cutting their carbon emissions:

READ MORE

Tags: Social justice, Green collar jobs.

Email it Permalink 0 comments Add a comment

AutoblogGreen had a post up over the weekend about green cars and the need for sexiness in design, and inadvertently illustrates the problem with "greenness" as a consumer choice.

There is one major problem with the current list of electric or hybrid sedans on the market right now: they are seen as boring by many people. Sure, some drivers have fun in their hybrids by squeezing the most mileage that they can from a gallon of gas, and many people have a good time with the "eco-screen" that many vehicles come equipped with, but those features could hardly be described as "sexy".

But, it was just a few years ago that "normal" was seen as an important design direction for green cars, after years of concept cars that looked more like running shoes or fishbowls.

If only we could make them look like normal cars that everyone is already used to seeing, the logic went at the time, the public would snap them up, and we'd be on our way to a green car nirvana. Now we're headed back in the opposite direction: electric and hybrid cars are too normal, too boring, too boxy. If only we could emulate the Tesla's success at turning heads, we'd really be onto something!

But it's long past the point where green can be an option or a style, as if they were choosing a leather interior or a ski rack. It's time to give up the "sexy" vs "normal" vs "futuristic" design war for trying to sell greenness, and decide as a society that green isn't a consumer choice or a design statement; it's all you get.

READ MORE

Tags: Green design, Cars.

Email it Permalink 0 comments Add a comment