I don’t know. But they both remind me of one of my favorite books. Probably one of the first books any aspiring environmental impact minimizer should buy, read, and read again in a couple of months. It’s called the Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices (put out by an awesome group called the Union of Concerned Scientists) and it basically rates the relative importance of your different decisions according to how much each decision will impact the environment. Ex: Decision 1: paper or plastic at checkout? Decision 2: Hybrid Hummer or Hybrid Xtracycle to work? The book ranks decisions such as these, essentially enabling you to focus your world-changing energy in the places where it matters most while leaving some energy left over for indulging in a plastic diaper every now and again. The simple fact is that there are 3-4 major choices that we as consumers make whose impacts usually are vastly more important to consider than a host of little things we might fret about all day long.
A specific example from a field close to my heart: one of the grandest things you can do for the environment is to move close to where you work (or go to school, basically wherever it is that you usually travel in a day), optimally so that you can walk or bike there.
Flying in planes is one of the worst things you can do, environmentally speaking. It’s about like traveling in a single-occupancy vehicle but for much longer distance than you usually drive. Flying to Europe is like driving your car alone for a year, global warming wise. My favorite book doesn’t really take air travel to task as much as I think it deserves, because they mistakely judge the impact on a pollution per mile kinda metric. What this misses is the jet-setting mentality that’s increasingly part of our culture: I’ll just fly out for the weekend, several times per year. In other words, air miles add up a whole helluva lot faster than car miles. How many times are you going to drive to Puerto Vallarta this year?
Take the train or boat (though the QE2 ain’t no saint neither), or even better, ride your bike and don’t go so far. And if you do fly, consider offsetting your carbon emissions.
