Also, I love my greens and went veggie for a while, but I’ve learned that most of the waste in animal raising is due to the horrific conventional agriculture: fossil fuel fertilizers, CAFOs, food distribution, etc. There is nothing wrong with being vegan, but I don’t feel bad about buying some Sea Breeze cheese (raised on Vashon) either. The ruminant digestive system evolved to metabolize many things that humans cannot.

Acronym dictionary.

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Dan’l,

Back when I lived in Sacto, SMUD was opposing dam removal on the Trinity, because that’s where they got a bunch of their “green” power from.

Gah! How can I forget about vegetarianism/veganism!!? I’ve been veggie for about 15 years, and one of my prime reasons is efficiency. We don’t have a food shortage problem on our planet, we have a food efficiency problem – we feed much of our food to animals, which provide us with only 10% of the food value in return. Not to mention the energy/effort/pollution required to raise animals.

I just did my carbon footprint a short while ago and discovered that I’m doing pretty well compared to the rest of the nation. But, if I become a vegetarian my carbon foot print reduces by nearly a third. If I become a vegan it has the single largest reduction of carbon use. I find that amazing and understandable.

Dan, is CFL=Canadian Football League? What is CAFE and YMMV?

I also agree that hydro is not the answer. If we need the rivers for energy we need to find another way to tap them without changing the landscape.

Spencer, if you (like me) are an evil single-family home owner and don’t drive much, the biggest impact you can likely have is in your home. Insulation, windows, appliances, etc, you know the drill. For me, the biggest roadblock is the high cost of replacement windows, probably $30k or more to do my whole house.

And don’t forget that as the smarty pantses at Sightline have noted, it may be that energy efficiency is a better investment than the stock market.

http://daily.sightline.org/daily_score/archive/2008/09/16/rational-exuberance

I was just catching up on my blog reading for the week, and, my, were you ever prescient with this post. As you’re probably aware by now, there was a nasty coal ash spill in TN just the day after you wrote the above text.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/us/27sludge.html?bl&ex=1230526800&en=6203116ae45cadc3&ei=5087

This coal ash spill is said to be “the largest environmental disaster of its kind in the United States” and yet it’s curiously absent from the top headlines on major news sites. Nor are we ever shown the day-to-day environmental carnage that results from coal mining (entire mountaintops razed; streams polluted with arsenic and other toxic runoff, etc., etc…) when discussing the viability of “clean coal.”

But this is a drop in the bucket. Also, rule of thirds applies and only ~1/3 of folks make deep reductions or changes to make a difference. The rest don’t care or won’t change or whatever. So,

We need as a society to close production loops, double CAFE standards, move to renewables, eliminate waste, reduce our overall consumption by about 350-450%. But, shucky darns, our economy is based on people buying trinkets and having a short life-cycle to buy new cr*p.

That is: unless society radically changes, individual action won’t do much. YMMV.