An Ecological Shell Game?
December 2nd, 2009 by ComputerBob
Have you taken steps to make your life more “green?”
I’ve done some things that will save energy, like super-insulating our home’s formerly barely insulated attic.
And switching some of our home’s lights to compact fluorescent bulbs.
But if I remember correctly, I once read that a person who drives a Hummer has a smaller total carbon footprint than a person who drives a Prius, simply because it takes incredibly more energy to build a Prius than it does to build a Hummer.
And I think I’ve also read that it takes almost as much energy to create ethanol fuel as there is in the amount of ethanol that you create.
So sometimes I wonder how much of what we do to be more “green” doesn’t just shift the ecological burden from technologies that we can see to those that we can’t see, so that we can fool ourselves into thinking that we’re saving energy.
And I strongly suspect that some very rich, very powerful people are exploiting our ecological naivete and sincerity to get even richer and even more powerful.
What do you think?
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