living green

The new American can’t-do spirit

Can we change our ways? Ditch the cars and move towards a greener approach to transportation.Photo courtesy of leelefever via flickr Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0. Americans have always been known to have a “can-do” spirit. During the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration tried out many different programs to confront the Great Depression and to spread […]

Springtime is peak time for naturally raised eggs — and bread puddings and meringues

Before moving on to the more glamorous spring harvests of asparagus, sweet peas, and strawberries, let us first praise the pastured farm egg. That’s right: Eggs, too, have a season. Spring has long represented the beginning of a new cycle, and eggs are the epitome of rebirth.  Easter egg huntshave their origins in ancient Pagan […]

Dave’s gonna blog from a green internet conference — awesome!

Just a reminder: I’m at the Earth2Tech Green:Net ’09 conference all day today. It looks like about half the people here are media, but if you don’t find the dozens of other outlets for commentary sufficient, you can follow along with the action on my Twitter feed. (Needless to say, Earth2Tech also has extensive coverage.)

World trembles with anticipation as David heads to green tech conference to tweet

All day tomorrow (Tuesday) I’ll be at Green:Net, a greentech conference sponsored by the excellent blog Earth2Tech. Specifically, the conference will be about how the tools that created the net and net architecture will help to revolutionize energy. You can check out the line-up here. Looks like there’s a big appetite for this stuff — […]

Eric Corey Freed extrapolates on his recommendations in the NYT

Monday I wrote “Ignore NYT’s Green Home column.” I was critical both of the author Julie Scelfo and Eric Corey Freed, the author of Green Building & Remodeling for Dummies. But having corresponded with Freed, it seems that his recommendations were taken somewhat out of context. He in fact provided a rough list of 20 […]

Umbra on hot tubs

Cool your jets. Dear Umbra, We purchased a home with an existing four-person, 500-gallon wooden hot tub with a two-stage electric pump. When should a hot tub be turned off to save energy? City Light recommends that our tub be on a timer to save electricity; our tub manufacturer insists that, unless we’re not using […]

Product service systems, Microsoft, blackouts, Kentucky’s Clean Energy Corps, and cool maps

Grist has comments turned off as we transition to a new website. If you have feedback on this post or anything else, let me know: droberts at grist dot org. • One of my favorite bright green ideas: objects as a service, sometimes called “product service systems,” a fascinating and potentially revolutionary idea desperately in […]

Umbra on water softeners

Dear Umbra, I live in an area that has fairly hard water. The calcium build-up on the sink faucets, shower enclosures, and even the dog water bowls is really bad, and hard to remove. So I have considered a full house water softener. However, I know nothing about them — but I do know you […]

What is the most unsustainable piece of junk you own?

An unusually unsustainable device that I own (see below).

I'm hoping to expand on the Ponzi scheme discussion in my next Salon piece. So I'm gathering examples of unsustainability at every scale.

In asking what is the most unsustainable piece of crap junk you own, I wasn't really thinking private jet or Hummer, not that I think any of you own that uber-unsustainable stuff.

Nor was I thinking of an electric dryer, since most people (in this country) own that laborsaving device. But that does get us closer to the key question, though: How many of the 10 billion people on the planet post-2050 will be using large amounts of electricity for things that are easily done without electricity -- once we have moved beyond desperation and are actually in the midst of the climate catastrophe.

By junk I was thinking of something closer to a relatively superfluous device that symbolizes the Ponzi scheme we have created. What comes to mind at the moderate cost level is a leaf blower and even a Segway (sorry, Dean Kamen -- your genius is really needed urgently for sustainability, not for electrifying human walking, even if many people find some value in that). I don't own either of those, but I do own a treadmill and a 50-inch flat panel TV (but hey it is Energy Star), which are close to what I have in mind in this post.

And I'd also be interested in hearing about any of the truly pointless low-cost stuff you have, like an electric pencil sharpener. Indeed, what really got me thinking about all this yesterday was my use of a gadget (pictured above) whose pointlessness and unsustainability simply staggers the imagination: