living green

Envisioning a future without disposable hotel pens and Timex watches

You know that point when you realize that you just can't keep buying more crap? Many families call it "December 26." Thomas Friedman calls it the Great Disruption. Saul Griffith has a more compelling framing. A sustainable future society, he says, will be a Rolex and Mont Blanc society. That is, when you are born, you get a Rolex and a Mont Blanc pen. And that's it. No Swatches to match your outfit. No gimme-pens from the Holiday Inn. It's an appealing aesthetic.

What can families do to reduce home energy use?

My name is not Earl. I've crossed everything off my list, and I'd like to share what I have learned about home weatherization.

I'll start with my results to date. I spent roughly $400 and achieved a 60 percent reduction in my gas-heating bill for the month of February. That huge reduction is testimony to what an energy hog my house was before I started this project.

My goal is an 80 percent reduction but that last 20 percent isn't going to come easy. To obtain that I will need to install a solar hot water panel in the one sunny patch of yard I have, a heat exchanger on the first floor shower drain, and possibly one of these bad-boy heat pumps. Our hot water accounts for almost 20 percent of our gas use.

Here's my list of weatherized add-ons:

Umbra on catchy Earth Day slogans

Dear Umbra, My work colleagues are trying to think of a catchy slogan to celebrate Earth Day this year. We typically plan a week of activities to educate and increase awareness of the benefits of being green. However, we are having a hard time agreeing on a slogan. Here are some ideas to date: Lean […]

Ford starts marketing campaign to emphasize fuel economy in new hybrid

During American Idol Tuesday evening, Ford launched the “We Speak Car” marketing campaign to sell the 2010 Fusion and Fusion Hybrid. The ads tout the Fusion Hybrid as “America’s most fuel efficient mid-size sedan,” which is awfully misleading because the 2010 Prius (50 mpg combined) is technically the most fuel efficient mid-size vehicle. It’s just […]

The specs and the dish on the 2010 third generation Prius

UPDATE: This story was changed to reflect updated EPA mileage estimates. Photo courtesy of Toyota. Toyota’s newest hybrid is almost here. Last week, the car company invited a group of journalists and bloggers to the third generation Prius preview in Napa, Calif. The deal was we could road test the 2010 model to our heart’s […]

Slate tricked into publishing a parody of its own reflexive contrarianism

In 1996, physics professor Alan Sokal submitted a paper to the postmodern culture studies journal Social Text. When it was published, Sokal revealed that the paper was an elaborate ruse, a parody, filled with the most absurd postmodernist tropes he could dream up. It became known as the Sokal Hoax.

Slate has just been the subject of what future historians will likely call the Pellettieri Hoax. Jill Hunter Pellettieri wrote an article lampooning Slate's penchant for vapid, picayune, deeply privileged, self-conscious contrarianism ... and tricked Slate into publishing it!

Well played, Pellettieri. Slate, you've been punk'd!

On the greenness of Jimmy Fallon's set

Word is that Jimmy Fallon's new late-night set is green, with features including low-VOC paint and reclaimed seats from Radio City Music Hall.

Which is cool and all. Except wouldn't it have been greener to just ... use the old set? (That said, kudos to Build It Green! for salvaging Conan's remains.)

And P.S.: As Kate rightly points out, Jimmy's house band, The Roots, is oh-so-green -- seen most recently at last weekend's Power Shift conference.

Umbra on incendiary topics

Dear Umbra, Your investigation for the raw milk advice apparently didn’t trip over the Real Milk Campaign of the Weston A. Price Foundation. I hope you can remedy the oversight in a future column. Stephen Guesman Alabama Dearest Stephen, Thank you for your kindly upbraiding and the opportunity to further discuss the problem of incendiary […]

The NYT asks: are we shaming our politicians about their lifestyles enough?

Eager to find new ways to trivialize the warming of the planet, the New York Times has been reporting on the carbon footprint of individual politicians and legislatures.

They are abetted in this effort by Terra Eco, a French environmental magazine that has calculated British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's footprint to be -- quelle horreur! -- 8,400 tons of CO2 per year. By my calcs, that's about 0.0001 percent of America's carbon footprint, so as soon as Brown buys a bicycle, we should have the climate problem pretty well licked.

In the meantime, I applaud Terra Eco's work on this important issue, and look forward to their upcoming report on the size of Al Gore's swimming pool.