They tell us not to drive Hummers.
They tell us to disconnect our cell phone chargers, once our cell phones are juiced. They tell us to switch off our laptops, burn candles rather than electric light, and sail boats rather than fly planes.
But do they ever tell us to wean ourselves off the animals that we cynically use as substitutes for our failed relationships with other humans?
I only ask because an article from the New Scientist has wafted in front of my breakfast bowl and slapped me about my flappy jowls.
Quoting such luminous organizations as the Stockholm Environment Institute at York, UK, the article purports to suggest that our pets have all the eco-friendliness of that Northwest Airlines flight that forgot to land in Minneapolis and just kept on going to Wisconsin.
Please, I understand that dogs and cats are lovely beings that just want to love you and lick you as long as you feed them and wash them.
However, the SEI seems to believe that a cat has almost the same carbon footprint as a VW Golf.
Here is a sentence from the article that I know may make some of you rather unwell: "As well as guzzling resources, cats and dogs devastate wildlife populations, spread disease and add to pollution."
Yes, I know you thought it was only multinational corporations that do that. So please imagine that there is a book, written by Robert and Brenda Vale, called "Time to Eat the Dog?: The real guide to sustainable living."
Because you are more numerate than me, I will leave you to examine their figures in lascivious detail. However, the Vales estimate that a 4.6-liter Toyota Land Cruiser has an eco-footprint that is less than half that of a medium-size dog.
It is largely to do with the amount of meat and cereal that dogs chow, but this is surely a vale of tears for those who need their dogs in so many different ways: to get exercise, to get companionship and to become attractive to members of their target sex.
In case you are not quite thoroughly depressed by this estimation of our ultimate demise, might I offer you two further calculations from the Vales?
Well, should you own two hamsters, that is the eco-footprint equivalent of your plasma. And one goldfish? Well, it's the energy-sucking equivalent of two cell phones.
To continue this cheery mood for just a little longer, please hark these words the New Scientist quotes-- they were uttered by David Mackay, a physicist at the University of Cambridge: "If a lifestyle choice uses more than 1 per cent of your energy footprint, then it is worthwhile reflecting on that choice and seeing what you can do about it."
The average cat, he estimates, represents 2 percent of a human's footprint. And as for dogs, oh, it really doesn't bear thinking about.
It seems to me, therefore, that you have some harsh choices to make in order to save our world.
Your goldfish or your family plan? Your hamsters or, at the very least, the plasma in your bedroom? Your dog or your Audi?
Your animal companions or your technological ones? Life just doesn't get easier, does it?
There's something quite sad when people fall out over Internet porn.
However, relationships do not appear to be anywhere closer to a consummated hug at Ireland's Green Isle Foods pizza-making plant.
Should you not have been arrested by this pulsating tale, Green Isle Foods dismissed three workers after accusing them of enjoying Internet porn on the job. Thirty-five pizza-producing people went on strike. This was five weeks ago.
Now, according to the Leinster Leader, the workers are trying to seduce the management into some making up and kissing.
In my mind, this pizza represents the fractious relationships at Green Isle.
(Credit: CC Kevitivity/Flickr)The Technical, Engineering and Electrical Union, which represents the workers, has offered a visit to the local Irish sex therapist, otherwise termed the Labor Court.
Management is playing rather hard to get. It has already refused to bare the other cheek by communicating with the union through the Irish Labor Relations Commission.
And now, a Green Isle Foods spokesman dismissed union efforts, telling the Leader that this is not an issue for group therapy.
"It (the company] will continue to interact with employees locally and directly to resolve the issue. In the meantime, operations remain as normal," he said.
I cannot possibly imagine who is making the pizzas if the workers and their highly sensitive dough-stroking fingers are outside picketing (and having pizzas delivered to them by sympathetic locals).
I cannot imagine how much fun it is to work at a pizza-making plant.
Indeed, the mere fact that there exist plants to make pizza seems entirely unedifying to me.
So I cannot help but feel a tinge of sympathy for three workers who were allegedly caught casting a furtive eye upon some material of a pornographic nature while pumping out pizza for the man.
According to the Belfast Telegraph, staff at the Green Isle Foods pizza-making plant in Naas, Ireland, will be calling for more strikers to protest the firing of their three frustrated colleagues.
The Irish Congress of Trades Unions has granted approval for the plant to be picketed by naked women. Well, perhaps I am imagining the "naked women" part.
The Technical, Engineering and Electrical Union, representing the three men, is disputing the very facts surrounding their dismissal.
"One of our members received an e-mail from outside the plant and was essentially dismissed for receiving an e-mail," TEEU general secretary designate, Eamon Devoy told the Telegraph.
I am guessing that the e-mail did not contain pictures of rolling Irish hills. Or perhaps it did.
Although a spokesman for the company told the Leinster Leader that this was "a cut and dried case of dismissal for people who seriously breached IT policy by accessing and e-mailing adult material of a serious nature."
Yet I am touched to hear that locals have come out in support of the workers. The Leader reports that they have delivered doughnuts to the picketing workers.
Oh, and pizza.
Alright now, you know-it-alls, show-it-alls, and tell-it-alls. It's time you people learned a little discipline, a little social decorum, a little good old fashioned discretion.
So here are the rules. No more Twittering. No more friending. And definitely no more updating people on your latest moods, feelings, lovers, and hangnails.
Yes, in what seems like a concerted effort on the part of traditional culture, two highly similar organizations, the Marines and the NFL, have decided to fight back against all the careless talk.
They have each reportedly begun to ban Twitter and Facebook.
Let's start with the Marines. According to CNN, a Marine Corps order has made the Corps' feelings known with characteristic subtlety: "These Internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user-generated content, and targeting by adversaries."
The enemy is lurking, Facebookers and Twitterers. Leave now.
The Marines' ban is supposed to last a year, after which time, presumably, it will be reassessed. And the Corps is extremely concerned about worms, Trojans and other items with nefarious purposes infecting its space.
However, this ban is not without its awkward strategic moments.
The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, has, as of Tuesday, 4,423 followers on Twitter. (He's following Katie Couric, but not Bill O'Reilly, by the way.) Will he, too, fall under a Marine-style ban if it becomes military-wide?
This picture of the Marines did not come from Facebook or Twitter. Honest.
(Credit: CC Sister 72/Flickr)There is, indeed, some doubt as to whether the ban has actually been enacted.
Thanks to Admiral Mullen's Twitter feed, I lucked upon a feed called Milblogging, which collates important military news and information.
It referred me to Wired.com, which quoted Price Floyd, the social-networking czar of the military, as saying that no decision had yet been made on a military-wide basis.
So have the Marines created an advance party before everyone else? It appears so.
Which leads us to the pioneers, at the NFL. The New York Times informs us that certain NFL teams appear to be chop-blocking social networking square in the back of the knees.
At the beginning of training camp, Green Bay Packers players were apparently told that they would be fined $1,701 (the NFL maximum) for texting or tweeting during a team function.
The Miami Dolphins do have their own Twitter page. But coach Tony Sparano, according to the Times, told players to lay off the tweets in order not to create additional distractions.
It's quite enough with NFL players taking guns to clubs (Plaxico Burress), organizing dog-fighting rings (Michael Vick), mowing down and killing pedestrians while drunk (Dante Stallworth), and showering strippers with cash and Cristal (Pac Man Jones). Who needs more socially dubious distractions?
But here's where the Marines and the NFL are very different.
Even though there are those who believe there are no secrets anymore, one can at least imagine that evildoers might scour the Marine personnel's personal sites for nuggets of information or vulnerability.
On the other hand, some might think that NFL players' behavior in tweeting from the locker room, the sidelines or even during games (as the Bengals' Chad Ocho Cinco threatened to do before the NFL said no) is just plain rude.
Yes, they might inadvertently reveal an ankle injury. But not half as much as they reveal their lack of class.
But an NFL player's career can be painfully short.
The average running back lasts perhaps three years. And very few players have contracts that guarantee them much more than this year and the next. So perhaps it's unsurprising that some players want to market themselves in any and every way they can in such a cynical environment.
One that is epitomized surely by college football coaches, some of whom have decided to tweet during games for one sole reason--to find a neat way around the NCAA rules regarding contact with recruits.
This behavior shows that the "here's what I'm feeling right now" culture is not confined to players, but to their bosses, too--if it suits their purposes.
Organizations that are based on values such as discipline and secrecy are not exactly well-suited to social networking.
It will be fascinating to see how they deal with this social phenomenon as time goes on--if they really manage to deal with it at all.
He hasn't twittered it yet, but I am suddenly full of belief that Shaquille O'Neal is about to buy a Smart car.
What has driven me to this "yes, we can" moment? Why, the first-ever NBA Green Week.
Launched Thursday, this is the NBA's attempt to reduce its carbon footprint (size 45).
It's a footprint that is characterized by large, pimped-out SUVs, vast, flashing scoreboards, long flights in 757s to New York and Los Angeles, and, especially, the infinite noxious detritus from its Pistons--exemplified by the fumes regularly emitted by power forward (and technical foul king) Rasheed Wallace.
The NBA has gotten its teams together to launch Green Week with the National Resources Defense Council, a green organization that proudly whispers the tagline: "The Earth's Best Defense." (This might cause a few of the Boston Celtics to cough a little furiously.)
The NBA even persuaded renowned, um, power hitter, Robert Redford to introduce the week on YouTube.
And, should you be so inclined (though it might burn up quite some laptop power), there are seven NBA videos to encourage you to change your position on the environment from center to power forward.
You can see members of the Houston Rockets and the Atlanta Hawks planting trees. You can enjoy Louis Amundson of the Phoenix Suns riding his bike to work. And you can commune with the Suns' Steve Nash as he talks about getting solar panels on the arena roof in Phoenix and about his clever basketball shoes made from recyclable materials.
Nash is one player who, when it comes to preaching, would never utter Allen Iverson's famous complaint: "Practice?? We're talking about practice?"
Nash lives in New York during the off-season and doesn't even keep a car there. Yet as you read on the special NBA site about the Denver Nuggets, the Charlotte Bobcats and the Chicago Bulls all wearing uniforms and socks made from 45 percent organic cotton, you wonder where the greenery begins and the greenbacks end.
It's all very well for the Toronto Raptors to offer a 25 percent discount to anyone who shows up with a ticket from public transportation. And it's lovely that any Minnesota Timberwolves fan who arrives by bus, train or, who knows, balloon for the game on Sunday will get a free upper-level ticket.
But these are teams that drying paint refuses to watch.
Then there's the extra-special opportunity for fans to purchase 100 percent organic-cotton shooting shirts and recycled Spalding basketballs.
As any fan of the Golden State Warriors will tell you, something is better than nothing. But wouldn't it be the ultimate joy if LeBron James suddenly rolled up to a game in a Prius with recycled, personalized hubcaps?
I mean, the NBA is where amazing happens, right?
So what kind of car are you going to get next? Perhaps, I might tempt your credulity by asking you to consider a new eco-car called the LEKO.
A Toyota? No, an IKEA.
A strange Web site has appeared, roulez-leko.com, on which a very relaxed, modern, eco-friendly chap, allegedly the great car designer Christophe Grozs, stands next to an apparent car draped with the word LEKO and the tagline "la voiture selon IKEA."
Yes, the car according to IKEA.
The LEKO (L'eco, get it?), allegedly has the backing of the World Wildlife Fund in France. Which might mean the fund has put money into the creation or that the car will have plastic panda-skin seats.
It also will save you untold (because unspecified) amounts of money on your expenditure. And it is humongously eco-friendly.
This is an ad, right?
If IKEA made a car, the doors might not fit quite perfectly into the body. Then you'd really have to work hard to use those tiny screwdrivers to make sure the engine didn't wobble. And just imagine the number of screws it would take to put in the cup holder.
There's the name too. Real IKEA product names never make sense. They always seem to resemble a fair to middling Scrabble hand--for example, KLIPPAN or LYCKSELE. LEKO is far too meaningful.
... Read moreWhat would you do, in this age of green power and greener pastures, to improve the image of the nuclear power industry?
And what would you do if you happened to live in the country where the nuclear power industry brought you, um, Chernobyl?
Well, the Russians, traditionalists to the bitter end, have come up with a brainwave of a quite elevated frequency. Yes, an online beauty pageant.
Who, on this Thursday that seems surrounded only by woes, can resist logging on to this sumptuous contest to find the most beautiful woman working in the Russian nuclear power industry?
In the interests of nuclear objectivity, I have taken it upon myself to observe some of the contestants with an artist's eye and an espionage operative's concern.
In all, there are 200 contestants. And all have the ambition to effect world peace and work with small children.
However, it is hard, merely by looking at these images, to know exactly what services these women perform to benefit the nuclear cause.
All the same, I am expecting voting to rival that of an average week of "American Idol".
Every day that we eke out our survival we know that there is some actuary or scientist working out whether it's worth us ever trying.
Professor Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist from Harvard, punched in a few numbers, posited a couple of suppositions, and declared that two Google searches generate as much CO2 as boiling a kettle.
You would, I hope, not expect me to spout the numbers at you, but apparently the fact that Google transmits every search inquiry to more than one server doesn't help. And, worse, even though Google believes it is the most efficient of search organizations, our desperate and faintly pathetic need for speed means that by searching we are burning up the planet like Nicolas Cage in Gone In Sixty Seconds.
Naturally, even though I have not finished my morning muffin, Wissner-Gross' numbers are already being disputed.
While he believes that looking at simple Web page like this one throws up 0.2g of CO2 per second, the folks over at Carbonfootprint.com (a site I try to avoid only because I care for my world) put the deleterious generation at between 1g and 10g per second. Apparently, much depends on whether you have to turn your PC on first.
So we cannot merely depend on our ability to stomach hybrid cars that make golf carts look sexy. We have to limit our searches to only the things we really need to find. Not the latest speeches from Al Gore. Not the latest supposed topless shots of Elisha Cuthbert. Not those meaningful updates on the latest couplings amongst the cast of Twilight.
And let's not even think about Twittering about the vast meaninglessness of Twitter.
Oh, conservation. It just seems so dreadfully conservative. I think I'll make myself another cup of tea. No, wait.
Gas may well be cheaper, but for how long? The markets shoot up, so does the demand for oil and suddenly you're filling your tank through your nose again.
In my daily quest to rid the world of its ills and leave only the smiles of stupefied faces, I believe I have found the solution to this crushing dilemma. It lies in two very recent scientific happenings.
Firstly, there was the mind-altering research performed at the Universite Laval in Quebec, Canada. Dr. Angelo Tremblay's team of intrepid psychosomatists found that it is entirely likely that thinking can make you fat.
Apparently, thinking uses up so much energy that you want to eat more. And more. Almost 30% more. Which presumably means that Luciano Pavarotti did far more thinking than singing throughout his life. And that Janet Jackson has periods when she cogitates mercilessly, punctuated by swathes of time when she allows air to waft gently from her locks.
Jean-Philippe Chaput, the main author of the study, was quoted in the Daily Telegraph as declaring that: "Caloric overcompensation following intellectual work, combined with the fact we are less physically active when doing intellectual tasks, could contribute to the obesity epidemic currently observed in industrialized countries."
(You see, Americans are so obese because they're so intellectual. Up yours, Europe.)
How, then, can we use this excess of brains and fat to alter our globally warmed landscape? Well, we only need to turn to the daring work performed by Dr. Alan Bittner. I use the word 'daring' because Dr. Bittner's work has sucked him into a little bother.
This appears to be an early experiment in generating enough fuel to go from Copenhagen to Stockholm.
(Credit: CC Stig Nygaard)He is the Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who allegedly turned fat from his patients into biodiesel, which he used to avoid his local Chevron and inject directly into the butt of his Ford Explorer and his girlfriend's Lincoln Navigator.
A gallon of human fat produces about a gallon of fuel. And the mileage you get out of your love handles is roughly the same as the mileage you get from diesel.
I understand and respect that currently it is illegal in the US to use fat produced by human guzzling to power your gas guzzler. But were that law to be relaxed, might we not be able to kill a whole flock of birds with one intellectual stone?
We could encourage the population to think more. People would therefore eat more. Then their excess poundage could be donated to fuel manufacturers. These voluntarily impounded donations would be tax deductible, naturally. And would result in a slimmer, fitter population. Until the people started thinking again, that is.
As the nation would become smarter, so would our cars. And the environment would tweet its gratitude from every river and treetop.
It is encouraging to be able to use science to solve so many of the world's problems by January 2nd. What would you like me to solve next? The financial crisis? I'm already onto it.
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