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Buying a Prius has benefits, but don’t forget the costs.

A reader of the Cascadia Scorecard Weblog had this question: What do we think about this piece of advice from the May-June Sierra Club magazine's "Hey Mr. Green" column?

Hey Mr. Green,

What's best for the environment, continuing to drive my perfectly fine 1990 Honda Accord, or trading it in for a new gas-sipping Prius? -- Heath in Los Angeles

Well, Mr. Green hates to say this because you might be bonded to your trusty old Accord, but she burns twice the petrol and wheezes out twice the global-warming gas of a Prius or similar hybrid model. Being a conscientious environmentalist, though, you're also worried about the energy and pollution involved in building a new car -- the equivalent of 1,000 gallons of gas. But by the time the Prius hits 50,000 miles, its energy savings will have made up for its own construction. So unless you drive very little, a new hybrid is the way to go.

That's not necessarily the advice I'd give.

Kunstler

There's recently been a flurry of ecoblogospheric attention paid to James Howard Kunstler and his new book The Long Emergency. (We'll have an interview with Kunstler on Grist in the next week or so.)

Kunstler gained an audience by writing several books about the evils of suburban sprawl, and then hooked up with "the kids" via a long excerpt from TLE published in Rolling Stone.

What prompted the outpouring is this interview in Salon, which contains such juicy tidbits as this:

It’s cool.

I went to the grand opening of the Ballard branch of the Seattle Public Library this afternoon (the old Ballard branch, a boxy, ugly blight, was replaced by a brand new one two blocks from my townhouse, oh happy day). It was a madhouse, with screaming, apple-juice-stained kids everywhere (I brought three myself), long lines at the desk, Bavarian folk music coming from one room and a chamber trio playing in another ... we had to flee fairly quickly.

However!

Although that other branch gets all the attention, the Ballard building is just awesome. A full list of its environmental features can be found here, but the coolest are the green roof, which visitors can look at through a periscope (!), the "notch and tab" furniture, each piece of which is cut from single sheet of laminated wood and fitted together (with a very hip modern aesthetic), and the solar panels. And check this out:

Rooftop scientific devices that measure wind speed and direction, sunlight and the sound of rain. The artwork - LED (light-emitting diode) displays and an audio composition of Ballard-area sounds - is derived from the weather data.

Art and music derived directly from the surrounding environmental conditions. Now that's cool.

(More from the Seattle Times.)

The moms are organizing. Go join them!

I would be remiss not to mention that the idea -- mothers organizing on behalf of the environment -- started by this story and continued in this discussion thread has found a home at the Green Life google group.

All you moms, head over there and see if you can chip in. And keep us posted!

 

Bill McDonough, movies, websites, heroes

As my unseemly gushing has no doubt made clear, I heart Bill McDonough. Someone (I forget who) pointed me a while back to this video, on a very cool site called BigPicture.tv, which is packed to the gills with short videos of nifty activists.

I couldn't get it to work the first time -- despite attempts on three different browsers -- but Alex linked to it again today, which prompted me to give it another go and what do you know, magically it worked.

So anyway, if you can get it working, it's short but worth watching, about how he envisions cities meshing with ecosystems.

Stats on the biggest kid on the Asian block.

Our fascination with China around these parts is well-known. However, we're not so fascinated that we want to read long, number-filled reports about it. I mean, it's Friday fer chrissake.

So, we let Joel Makower do that work for us. He waded through WorldWatch's just-released "Vital Signs 2," a compendium of info on worldwide environmental trends, and found lots of tasty (and, okay, some terrifying) tidbits on the world's fastest growing big economy. Read his summary and be enlightened.

Here's a taste, from WW:

Weekend reading

The Senate Energy Committee released some of the titles of their draft energy legislation today. So what are you waiting for? Start reading!

Are greens jumping the gun by bashing GE’s new ecomagination?

Over on TomPaine.com today, Frank O'Donnell of Clean Air Watch takes on GE's "ecomagination." Frank makes some compelling arguments -- similar to comments made on gristmill earlier in the week -- as to why this is just a bunch of greenwashing.

As strange as it makes me feel to ask this question, I'll do it. Aren't we jumping the gun here, gang? Shouldn't we want a polluting corporation to have an "Extreme Makeover"? Or are we saying "Mission Impossible" to any attempts to change because of past environmental sins?

Call me naive (and you probably will in the comments), but it seems like we have to actually give GE a chance to fulfill their "ecomagination." So what do you think? Extreme makeover or mission impossible?

(I'll admit they are not off to a good start with this appropriation rider shenanigans.)

Rivers Phoenix

Many small waterways rising from ashes, but U.S. rivers still ailing With press attention focused on major river cleanups — when it’s focused on rivers at all — some 37,000 small river and stream restoration projects in the U.S. have gone largely unnoticed, despite their environmental importance. The local, state, and federal restorations, costing an […]

Teach an Old Dog a New Mix

Brit researcher says clean energy has more juice than previously thought It’s a familiar argument: Renewable-energy technologies are not “mature,” and the power they provide is intermittent, so nuclear power is our only reliable, large-scale alternative to greenhouse-gas spewing oil and coal. But Graham Sinden of Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute begs to differ. With […]