****************

As one of the ‘low-impact’ things to do is use glass instead of
plastics to drink, eat, store and heat foods with instead of the
bisphenol-A laced plastics. Reusable glass wash it and use it
again. Heating plastics increases the outgasing of bpa.

I had a “crazy” Great Aunt, who used to reuse tea bags. She had thumbtacks in the edge of the window sill where she would hang them. She was a product of the Great Depression, and NOT a baby boomer. Saving, and conservation are not encouraged in a consumer based, inflationary (monetary) society, as we currently have. Unfortunately, I believe it will take another depression to effectively change personal attitudes.

On a personal note: Having installed a few bamboo floors, I am actively pursuing an effort to start a bamboo farm. It is not just altering our personal habits that can have an impact, it is also our business, employment and investment decisions, if we are willing to sacrifice immediate gains for long term growth potential.

“Will you join me in lowering our impact?”

Real good question, especially juxtaposed with the recent Rolling Stone trash piece on the “death” of climate change legislation.

Sub-titled:

“Obama isn’t making the Republicans do what we want them to do, so let’s undermine Obama’s ability to do anything.”

In this so-called piece of journalism—replete with “Obama could’a's” and “Obama should’a's”—were a few inconvenient facts, buried and minimized so as not to distract from the headline or the photo caption.

Inconvenient facts like the fact of hundreds of calls with the White House to a team crafting legislation. Of the efforts of his own EPA. Of billions invested in the technology. Of his successful effort to derail a Republican attempt to thwart the one tool Obama HAS at his disposal to push the agenda without legislation.

In other words, reading based on the facts, Obama is doing everything he realistically can do. But don’t focus on that, dear reader.

Neither focus on the fact that the so-called piece of journalism mentioned three times—from three sources the novelist obviously glorified—the fact that legislation COULD NOT GET THROUGH THE SENATE.

Why couldn’t it?

Forty Republican Senators, nameless—NAMELESS—save for the brave Lindsey Graham who so wants climate change legislation. The brave Senator Graham, so frustrated by Obama’s choice to push health care—yeah, we didn’t really want that, did we, right, huh, right?—that brave Senator Graham threatened to filibuster his own legislation.

Pity him. Mean ole Obama. Pity the other 39 Republicans while you’re at it.

The inexplicable, incredible, unbelievable, unanswered political question of this era will undoubtedly turn out to be how a minority of Republicans—supported by a mere sliver of a base—voted against the nation’s interest AS WELL AS THEIR OWN interests, thereby causing the liberal press and liberal voters to blame everyone but them, and thereby aid in the election of more people opposed to the liberal agenda.

Un-fricking-believable!

Thanks, Rolling Stone. Besides the above, you succeeded in totally avoiding the obvious. You are a business, after all, that persists by cutting down trees, pouring gallons of ink onto paper, driving it all over the country, containing so-called journalism about how everyone else needs to do something about the environment.

Mission Accomplished.

I’m sure your response will be that you’ve made arrangements to be “carbon neutral” just like the joke concert tours you promote. “Carbon neutral” is an ideal at best, a myth in fact. Why not report the truth?

Sirota has done a painful but good service to the liberal community, if it bothers to listen. There’s a HUGE disconnect between our flippant “we can all be green” ‘tude, and the difficulty it actually is to get there. This disconnect includes not only climate change, but many other issues near and dear to the hearts of liberals. Too often we act as know-it-all snobs intent on making other people cure the problems we’re too damn lazy to tackle.

And his name is O-b-a-m-a.

Undermining an administration and a movement sympathetic to your purported cause, I think, would be near the bottom on your list of editorial tactics designed to get what you say you want.

Unless you’re just boneheads, or just trying to make a buck.

thank you, david sirota, for your candid article. we all have run out of valid excuses for continuing our wasteful habits. those who have the ability to change and don’t are the most responsible for the state we find ourselves in.

there has been an awful lot of waiting around for the newest “green” technology. conservation has always been the most obvious answer, willfully ignored.

arguing against individual actions is just one more lame excuse to not do the right things.

Good question: “what is collective action?”
Collective action means action in concert by a mass organization with the capability of sanctioning its members. Usually that means government. Even when it doesn’t mean government it usually means an organization pressuring the government to do something—small scale collective action leveraging large scale collective action, which is what the environmental movement is doing and needs to do more of. Unions are a rare example of collective action on a relatively large scale mostly aimed at private rather than political targets—and currently most of their successes depend on government backing (through the NLRB).

The hole in the ozone layer is a wonderful example. Thoroughly insoluble through the individualistic action of refusing to buy CFCs. Solved collectively at the flick of several pen though an international treaty (plus a lot of negotiation and a lot of enforcement.) Refusing to buy CFCs now adds nothing to the solution. (How fortunate we are that there were very few $billions invested in CFCs.)

david.burress—Obviously if 300 million people have a problem, one person acting alone is probably not going to solve the problem, unless it’s a very, very unusual problem.  However, collective action spans a very broad spectrum from two people acting together to all of the three hundred million, and from changes in one’s own behavior and gentle suasion to passive resistance, non-violent resistance, terrorism, open warfare and government.  So I’m not sure what you’re talking about when you say “collective action.”

I find Sirota’s sort of theater a bit tedious, myself, but that’s because I’m already a vegetarian, use a bicycle to get around, etc., etc., and I’ve heard it all before.  Maybe other people are thrilled by it, though, and they should enjoy themselves.

So now that the one week is over, are you back to your “old ways”? I certainly hope not because it is true that every movement starts with one person taking one step and dragging everyone else along by example.

I have lived low impact for years and every day I go outside and pick my dinner from the garden I hope that others will realize the joy that comes from living a simple life in harmony with our Mother Earth.

The best case that can be made for individual action on environmental issues is that it paves the way for collective action in various ways—e.g. showing how life could be lived when we take appropriate steps; showing that environmentalists are not hypocrites; drawing attention the problem; making a political point about what kind of a world we want to live in. I support what Sirota is doing for that reason. Nevertheless individual action cannot solve major problems like climate change. It is not even needed as part of the solution: appropriate collection action acting alone can solve the problem, whereas individual action acting alone cannot. Attacking leftwingers who point out this well-supported regularity is counterproductive.

Individual action can solve collective problems in small groups because you can bring social pressure to bear on the holdouts.  It is a law of economics that individual action cannot solve large-scale collective problems in large groups. (It’s called the free rider problem.)  Does anyone have a counter-example? That is, are there any examples of a social norm not backed by laws that solves a large-scale collective problem? Name just one and I’ll back down. (By a “large scale problem” I mean one where individual action by any one person has appreciable net costs for that person but has no noticeable impact on the problem.)

David Burress
Ad Astra Institute of Kansas
http://www.adastrainstitute.org

It is useful to read D. Sirota’s experience with low-impact week.

Some of us have been practicing low-impact for a long time by choosing
lasting goods over disposable ones, avoiding the over-use of the car, not
owning entertainment gadgets and vehicles that consume gasoline and spew
fumes, and not jumping on a plane every time a relative graduates from
kindergarten….just a few examples.  But, as he points out, for many people and
for many reasons it can be a difficult or impossible thing to do very thoroughly.

Compounding that is the fact that we are being misled by the makers of “green”
products (and green advice) because, in the final analysis, these products are
far from green. Although some good investigative and science reporting is
surfacing in this regard, people end up getting confused and cynical over the
whole issue. The proliferation of “green” vigilantes that is seen in some
communities can be quite obnoxious and counterproductive too. That’s why we
need leadership in this matter. It is a very legitimate and necessary function of
government to try to sort it all out in a comprehensive way, and we need to
demand that it be done.  Low-impact is the sane way to go but don’t think for
a minute that this alone is going to result in high impact on the energy and
environmental problems we have.

****************

I wouldn’t worry so much about living a ‘low-impact’ day, week,
month or responsibly for the rest of your lives. Good old turd
licker, bennie the bernanke, is now reassuring america that ‘the
fed will take action if the economy falters’.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2010-08-27-fed-
bernanke_N.htm

Kind of a sick fucking joke, I’d say, since all indications are that
he economy hasn’t just faltered for everyone, but the elite(who
are the ones for whom benny’s fed will ‘take action’) as just what
real economy is still there for the people? No sense in even
hoping that the real problem here could be resolved by simply
repealing the federal reserve act of 1913, so no, there is no
more hope coming from the cow with 310,000,000 tits as now
‘hope’ is a dangerous deadly part of socialism.

We were once living more collectively than now. Collectivism and individualism was at a point of time prior to priestly rule over us inextricably interwoven.

Today, especially in US, people do not live as collection of people in which collection [US governnace]does not look as it should after a vast number of that collection of people.

Actually, they are advised, to be strongly anti-collective; i.e., interdependent; while in fact the advisors themselves appear socialist; i.e., much interdependent as the bailouts, warfare, promotion of individual responsibilities, etc., clearly show.

So, if sirota is doing this to further ruling class’ cause, then, it canot bring any fruit!
But why i am wondering about what cause he promotes?
All MSM collumnists promote self-interest first of all and much secluded from the total collection of people!tnx

for those interested in sharing ideas on ways we can immediately reduce our impact and lower energy bills, please come check out the USE HALF NOW campaign on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/USE-HALF-NOW-CAMPAIGN/316473176497?ref=mf

we have all the technology we need to cut our addiction to fossil fuel IMMEDIATELY - we just need to look for more efficient ways to start living our lives NOW. conservation is the most obvious, simple, cheap, immediate, and constructive method available.