Green Tech Girl

The amazing “picture within a picture” photographs on Chris Jordan’s website show us in stark visuals how much waste we create on the planet on a daily, hourly and minute-by-minute basis. All the pictures are chilling, but the one that got me the most was the one depicting “426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.”

A half a million cellphones retired each and every day in the United States? Geez oh pete! What are people doing with these cellphones? Dropping them out of 10-story windows? I’ve had mine for a few years now. Let’s get over our constant upgrade addiction, shall we?

I never liked taking commuter planes. These are the planes that sputter along, noisy and loud, turbulent and unstable like a flying rollercoaster. So I’m not too disappointed by this study showing that smaller planes are being left behind as fuel prices rise. I consider this the warning shot across the bow in terms of peak oil, however. Large planes may soon follow, and our days of cheap travel may be coming to an end. Bummer. I have yet to see Europe. Time to get my traveling in before it becomes something only the rich can afford.

First incandescent bulbs were the enemy. Now CFLs are getting bad marks from the EPA for their mercury content. Are there any good light bulbs out there? Maybe we need to switch to soy candles or something…

The Sierra Club has a quiz on the energy efficiency of various television technologies. You can take the quiz here. (I got a high score even though I guessed on many of the answers.)

I was interested to find out that my guess that it’s better to keep my old CRT than trade it in for a large widescreen was right – keeping the CRT is probably the more eco-thing to do. Why? (more…)

I just bought my first printer in nine years. Yes, that’s right, nine years. When I say I am anti-consumerism, I really mean that. If something works, I don’t just throw it out to get something new. I have a perfectly good 1994 HP LaserJet that still does the bulk of my printing. In 1999, I bought an Epson color inkjet. That was the last printer I purchased. I wasn’t using it that much, but it, along with an old printer/scanner combo a friend gave me, finally bit the dust.

So I went to Costco and got a new Canon all-in-one printer for around $100 with tax. This thing is amazing. It prints, it scans, it copies, and it faxes. And excuse me for sounding like an old fart here, but back in the day I used to own a printer, a copier, a fax machine and a scanner. Trying to find homes for these items in my then one-bedroom apartment was a challenge. My home copier was actually situated on the top of my fridge. (more…)

Look, I’m not a fan of McMansions, but what on earth is the point of burning them down in the name of the environment? Overzealous nutjobs affiliated with the “Earth Liberation Front” just burned down a bunch of “green” luxury homes in a Seattle suburb. OK, ELF morons: Did it ever occur to you that burning down those houses probably hurt the environment just as much as building them did? So your overall net effect with this was to:

a) discourage green developments
b) make environmentalists look like crazy terrorists
c) hurt the environment…because by burning large buildings, you’ve just increased the number of toxic fumes in the air around Seattle and will now force people to demolish and rebuild on that very same spot.

Good job, idiots. Yeah, that was smart thinking on your part – destroying existing homes really helps the environment…umm, I don’t think so. (more…)

There are quite a few things I like about the Libertarian party, except for one huge glaring problem: environmental policy. They think somehow that the “free market” will fix all environmental woes. Are they nuts? Check out this old post from the Libertarian blog, complaining that government restrictions are stopping oil companies from making new refineries in the United States. (more…)