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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:

All That You Can’t Weave Behind

Fashion consumers tending toward greener garb Increasingly, fashionistas “don’t just want to look good in their clothes, they want to feel good in their clothes,” says Ali Hewson, co-creator (with her husband, U2’s Bono) of eco-sensitive clothing line Edun. With a growing number of ethical and green clothing lines hitting the market and making use […]

Subsidy Slickers

Nuke subsidies being added to McCain-Lieberman climate bill The latest draft of the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act proposes hundreds of millions of dollars in new subsidies for the nuclear power industry, in the form of a cost-splitting arrangement that would have the feds shoulder half the expense of developing and getting regulatory approval for three […]

On a Wing and a Mayor

U.S. mayors form coalition to fight climate change, one city at a time A bipartisan coalition of 132 U.S. mayors — led by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels (D), and recently joined by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R) — has issued a high-profile rebuke of Bush administration inaction on climate change. The leaders have […]

Neva Goodwin, ecological economist, answers questions

Neva Goodwin. What work do you do? I’m an economist, and codirector of the Global Development And Environment Institute at Tufts University. How does it relate to the environment? My overall goal is to affect what people are taught when they take economics courses, and to change the kind of economics that’s subsequently in people’s […]

Umbra on letter-writing campaigns

Dear Umbra, I just switched to all-natural cleaning products (Seventh Generation, it’s great!) and I wanted my switch to have the most impact possible. I was thinking about sending emails to the companies whose cleaning products I had previously used, telling them why I switched, describing the nasty effects of their products, and encouraging them […]

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.