Salon.com > Liz Galst

Burger and fries to go

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:52:00 +0000

Hey, you, environmentalist: Want the greenest wheels going but find yourself lacking $109,000 for a Tesla Roadster? Despair not! There's a vehicular option that makes a Prius seem like a gas guzzler and can save you major bucks, too. (Here's the only catch: This option may not be strictly legal under the federal Clean Air Act. But more on that later.)

The vehicle in question is a grease car, a ride capable of lowering your motoring greenhouse gas emissions by 78 to 87 percent over regular gasoline. A grease car is a diesel car, truck or Jeep that runs on waste vegetable oil from your local greasy spoon or fine-dining establishment. A grease car also significantly reduces a bevy of environmental badness -- asthma-triggering particulate matter, smog-forming carbon monoxide, likely carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and the sulfur emissions that lead to acid rain. The only environmental downside is a small increase in smog-forming nitrogen oxide.

Stop junk mail for good

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:05:00 +0000

You'd think that with all the spam floating around the Internet these days, good old-fashioned junk mail, the kind that clogs your home's mailbox and the nation's landfills, might be a thing of the past.

Alas, that is not to be. The amount of direct mail that catalog companies, Internet purveyors, and coupon captains send out each year continues to climb, up from 90.5 billion pieces in 2003 to a whopping 103.5 billion pieces in 2007, according to the U.S. Postal Service. "It's a colossal waste," says Kristi Chester Vance, communications director of ForestEthics, a group that has worked to reduce the environmental impact of the catalog industry.

In fact, the annual greenhouse-gas emissions from the production of junk mail are equal to those of 3.5 million cars. (That figure doesn't include emissions from transporting and disposing of the stuff.) Beyond that, each year junk mail production in the U.S. consumes more than 96.7 billion gallons of water and more than 100 million trees, ForestEthics estimates. Most of those, says Chester Vance, come from carbon-dioxide-sequestering, biologically diverse old-growth forests, rather than from sustainably managed tree farms. And according to the Environmental Protection Agency, only about a third of all junk mail is recycled. "All that for a response rate of less than 3 percent," Chester Vance notes, referring to the fact that fewer than 3 percent of people -- often even fewer -- respond to the solicitations.

Earth to PETA

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 12:00:00 +0000

At lunchtime in late September, on a relatively untraveled stretch of sidewalk outside the U.S. State Department, demonstrators from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals attempted to catch the attention of, well, anyone.

Inside the building, Condoleezza Rice was trying to convince world leaders that the U.S. was serious about global warming; outside, two PETA members handed out fliers featuring a photo of Paul McCartney. "Think you can be a meat-eating environmentalist?" it read. "Think again!" Two other protesters, dressed in chicken suits, displayed a green and chartreuse banner: "CliMEAT Change," it read. "Meat: #1 cause of global warming."

Earlier that morning, as dignitaries entered the building, PETA made an effort to drive its message home. The group draped its banner across a champagne-colored Hummer and drove it around the State Department. By noon, the Hummer was parked across the street. "The plan didn't work so well because of security and the way the roads are set up," confessed Matt Prescott, PETA's manager of factory farm campaigns.