Green Options

January is a good month. It’s a month that is the human symbol of starting over. Out with the old, in with the new. This January was particularly exciting for us here in the US, as we ushered in a new era of progressive politics with almost a little too much pomp and circumstance. But underneath the excitement lies a particularly disconcerting truth. We still have a nation to fix.

When I heard NPR report that environmentalists were “fuming” over the Salazar appointment as Interior Secretary, I decided to share my thoughts with the Twitterverse and sent out a message that kicked off a chain of events worthy of writing about.

Finally digging out of my post partum haze to report back to duty here at Eco Child’s Play, I was greeted this morning with the news that one out of three toys tested are found to have toxins. According to this NPR report, Healthy Toys, a Michigan non-profit organization, found that while toys made in China did have higher toxin levels, the ones with the made in the USA label were not guaranteed to be safe either.

Video source: NPR

Sound familiar?  Unless you’ve had your head stuck in the sand for the past couple of months, you’ve heard variations on this statement from both Barack Obama and John McCain… countless times. High gas and utility prices have collided with a stagnant economy,  and energy issues (and the environmental issues accompanying them) have come to the front and center of the ‘08 election cycle.

My colleagues at Red, Green and Blue have done a thorough job of covering the policy proposals of the presidential candidates. But the devil’s in the details, and NPR’s Talk of the Nation: Science Friday held a fascinating discussion last week on the issues that aren’t being covered in the political rhetoric: namely, the economic and technological challenges that both government and the private sector will have to address to get us to a clean energy future. Host Ira Flatow, New York University professor emeritus of physics Martin Hoffert, and Wallace S. Wilson Fellow in energy studies and associate director of the energy program at Rice University Amy Myers Jaffe took a look at the bigger picture of our energy challenges, and the kinds of leadership a new presidential administration will have to exert in order to facilitate rapid, even revolutionary, changes in how we power ourselves.

Among the questions raised during the discussion:

A restructuring of the EPA that created a cabinet seat might offer the type of coordinating capacity that our federal government currently lacks, in terms of creating a coherent climate change policy.

Probably you missed it, but last week there was a fascinating interview on the NPR program Talk of the Nation. The segment featured a scientist named David Goldberg, who answered questions about his research concerning the plausibility of storing massive amounts of carbon dioxide in basalt formations deep below the earth’s oceans.

In a paper that is available online and will be published in an upcoming issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Goldberg and his colleagues write about how a basalt formation off of the coast of Oregon and Washington could potentially store anywhere from 120-150 years of carbon produced by the United States in its cavities (assuming current U.S. emission rates do not increase).

While initially I was extremely skeptical of this idea (because I thought that it might cause all kinds of unintended ecological havoc), by the end of the interview, I was somewhat more optimistic.

When the award-winning film The End of Suburbia was released in 2004, it was considered by some to be an amusing but exaggerated view of what Peak Oil will do to the suburban way of life. As gas prices approach $5/gallon, it doesn’t seem quite so shocking.

As a passionate enemy of suburban sprawl, I listened intently to an interview this morning on NPR with Brookings Institution demographer William Frey in which he notes that housing prices are falling faster in the areas outside cities. Is this a permanent correction that is making “exurbs” less desirable overall? And how are gas prices influencing this loss of home value? Mr. Frey was cautious in his answer, saying “the jury is still out” and that Americans have a history of moving outward from cities in order to buy more housing for less, seeing long commutes as an acceptable trade off.

However, it doesn’t take a genius to see that, when a commute costs more than one is saving on housing, while sucking up hours of one’s valuable time, (and as the saying goes, “They aren’t making more of that”) why would one buy a home in the far suburbs? Why, indeed?

Sperling’s Best Places did a survey two years ago when gas prices were at $2.90 a gallon. The following were the most expensive cities in which to commute and listed the average annual commuting cost:

City Annual Commuting Cost (2006)

1. Atlanta $5,772
2. Birmingham, Ala. $5,464
3. Orlando, Fla. $5,404
4. Jacksonville, Fla. $5,360
5. Pensacola, Fla. $5,173

So, if gas prices reach $6.00, Atlanta’s commuting cost would be over $10,000 per year. Yikes.

I’ve been smitten with tunes from Nellie McKay ever since I heard “the dog song” on the morning addition of NPR’s Live in Studio 4A.

In addition, Nellie has also graced the pages of ecozine Sprig to talk about her vegan life with an interview on living beautifully as a very concerned vegan and talented musician.

Green Options writer Maria Surma Manka suggested this simple tip she heard on NPR: change the margins of the documents you print, and save lots of paper. Smaller margins means more text per page with less wasted white space. The idea is simple: by switching the margins from the default 1" or 1.25" to .75" or less, we would us 4.75% less paper. This may not seem much for

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Yogi Berra once said, “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.” It’s just as important to know why you want to get there. Writing an essay about what you believe will help you identify the values that motivate you to achieve your goals and enable you to share those values with others.

Our beliefs underpin our everyday decisions and determine how we interact

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