For Earth Day, I quit eating meat and started recycling to better the planet. I'm planning to buy a road bike and looking at the variety of bikes there are on craigslist, it is looking pretty sweet. I'm going to try to bike to places that are 2-5 miles from my house and use my car less.
I went to a presentation about carbon foot print and electric cars today. The professor talked about this idea of conspicuous consumption, it means people buy items to display their wealth or whatever is trendy at the moment. Going Green has been the latest trend that the media is advertising, they're advertising to buy cotton shirts instead of polyester and go buy a Toyota Prius.
That's all good and well to "go green" but don't just go out and buy random crap to say you're going green. Buying a Toyota Prius when you don't need one for example leaves a bigger carbon foot print than driving regularly with your diesel fueled Mercedes. The things they do not tell you on the commercials is that making a Prius takes a load of materials that are extremely harmful to the environment. The battery that powers the Prius is made out of Nickel and the factory dubbed the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario becoming a nightmare for the Canadians. The spread of sulfur dioxide in the air has caused acid rain around Sudbury, it was so bad that all the plants in the surrounding area were destroyed and the soil slid down off the hill slide.
Source:
http://clubs.ccsu.edu/recorder/editorial/editorial_item.asp?NewsID=188
Why don't they advertise that?
