consumerism

George A. Polisner, socially responsible e-shopkeeper, answers questions

George A. Polisner. What work do you do? I’m the founder and president/CEO of alonovo.com. What does your organization do? We are working to empower people by fully informing their market decisions. We are infusing the online shopping experience with a simple ratings system based upon trusted research data on social responsibility. People can choose […]

Highs and lows of sweet, sweet wonkitude

Enough about The Reapers. How's the rest of the American Prospect environment package?

Much of it, sadly, is deathly, wonkily boring. In particular, Carl Pope ... dude. What is this pap? It's so bland, so politician-y, it takes genuine concentration even to get through it. You've written better stuff on your blog, for chrissake. This from Ross Gelbspan and this from John M. Meyer are similarly forgettable.

But there are many bright moments. Bill McKibben could write about what he ate for dinner and make it engaging, but I found the conclusion of this piece on global warming particularly on-point:

Will hard-won environmental and social gains survive China’s economic rise?

The way China has catapulted itself onto the Monopoly board of global capitalism has caught most Western leaders on the hop. Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid looking back at their pursuers, top U.S. and European Union businesspeople are wondering, “Who are those guys?” Yuan-a make a deal? After all, how much do we […]

Replacing fossil fuels with biodiesel may do more harm than good

I remember when real environmentalists drove smoking VW vans with bumper stickers that said stuff like, "You can't call yourself an environmentalist if you eat meat." They didn't get the best gas mileage, but hey, you could do worse. They were replaced by the forest-green Subaru Outback (Eddy Bower edition if you were really cool), seen by the dozens in any REI parking lot. These are presently being eclipsed by the ubiquitous Prius. But, there is stiff competition from the diesel Jetta replete with biodiesel stickers all over the butt end.

As we all know by now, biodiesel can be made out of a lot of things:

Soybeans: 50 gallons per acre
Rapeseed: 150 gallons per acre
Jatropha: 175 gallons per acre
Palm oil: 650 gallons per acre

To limit the impact on the planet, maybe we should start pressuring our biodiesel distributors to sell fuel made only from palm oil? According to the World Wildlife Fund, we would also need to demand that it be made out of palm oil grown only on degraded, non-forested land:

Beware the hype around plug-in hybrids

An article in Business Week Online tells us that experimental hybrid cars get up to 250 mpg (a very similar article appeared in the New York Times business section a couple of months earlier). I enjoy reading between the lines of lay press science and technology articles. There was a great discussion in Grist on this subject not too long ago.

Gremban ...spent... $3,000 tinkering with his car... [I]n the trunk sits an 80-miles-per-gallon secret -- a stack of 18 brick-sized batteries... [T]he extra batteries let Gremban drive for 20 miles with a 50-50 mix of gas and electricity.

In other words, for his $3000 he will get 80 miles per gallon for 20 miles before his carriage turns back into a pumpkin. For the rest of the day he will carry a hundred pounds of bricks around in his now-useless trunk, which by the way will degrade his gas mileage. For the first 20 miles he drives each day he will save 0.25 gallons, thus recouping his $3000 in about twenty years, assuming his batteries last that long. The more miles he drives after the batteries go dead, the worse things get because of the extra weight of the dead batteries in his trunk. Which leads me to ask: If his commute is only ten miles each way, why not just ride a bike, get a little exercise, and save $3000? You can also get 80 mpg out of a 40-mpg car by carpooling with one passenger, or get 120 mpg with two passengers, or 160-mpg with three passengers.

When it comes to green products, who’s zoomin’ who?

“I don’t trust ‘natural.’ People are always dying of natural causes.”— Woman looking at food labels, in a Richard Guindon cartoon Roll playing games? Photo: Laura Cacho. Shoppers of the world, I have just one question: Are you an eco-chump? Lots of us try to shop green. We buy unbleached paper towels and recycled products, […]

Car-sharing starts to take off.

Here's a bit of interesting news on car sharing companies, which, according to The New York Times, are catching on a bit in Europe. The most salient bit:

Studies suggest that one shared car replaces 4 to 10 private cars, as people sell their old vehicles...The result is a 30 to 45 percent reduction in vehicle miles traveled for each new customer.

Now, 30 to 45 percent is a pretty sizeable decline in driving. But this shouldn't come as too much of a surprise; as any economist would predict, converting a fixed cost (e.g., the cost of buying the car) to a variable cost (e.g., the cost of renting a shared car, which for Seattle Flexcars costs up to $9 per hour) makes people far more selective about how much they drive. And that probably saves car-sharers money overall: Yes, they pay more for each trip, but they make fewer trips, and also avoid much of the expense of purchasing and maintaining a car for personal use.

And there’s massive demand.

Holy smokes! Mike Millikin reports that pre-orders for the wee-little ZAP "Smart Car" have topped $750 million. That's pretty amazing. Apparently the U.S. Department of Transportation has signed off on it, so as soon as ZAP finds a U.S. distributor, the candy-cars are on their way. I want one!

For more on the Smart Car, see these two previous posts by Mike.

Semi? He thought they said Demi

Two months ago, we mocked Ashton Kutcher for buying a behemoth, 10-mile-per-gallon (on a good day) International CXT, or commercial extreme truck.

Now, Kutcher's mocking himself. "My semi? It's the most idiotic thing I've ever purchased," he's quoted as saying in, ahem, In Touch Weekly. (I was flipping through it in line at the co-op, OK?)

ContactMusic.com reports that he may auction the beast off.

"It's a weird boy's dream," he said by way of explaining his stupidity. "Growing up in Iowa, all these kids in my school who had money would go out and buy these Toyota pickup trucks and put these huge wheels on them, and I would go, 'Oh man, I've got to have one of those.'

"So when I saw this truck in the newspaper, I knew I had to have it ... Then I got it, and I was like, 'Son of a bitch, I should have looked at it first.' I didn't realize it was that big."