Calculate how much water you use--again

This one comes from Correspondent Hines, who, even in the midst of world travel with fiancee Tara, still has time to send us less exciting Londoners greenie websites. This, like the carbon emissions footprint on BP.com, is a quick and easy way to figure out what you're using and where. Our household came in at 1/2 of national average but that's still 34 buckets of water per person per day. I bet the environment misses my pre-professional days when I'd wear the same pair of jeans 3, 4, 5...6 times before washing them. Care of Correspondent Hines, reporting from Ecuador, behold the water calculator. + Find out how much water you use

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Relieving your travel guilt with carbon neutralization packages

Brother Ren, who shall now be called Research Ren as he is better at it than I am, has sent in this guilt-alleviating website which allows anyone to purchase carbon neutrlaization packages. + Carbon Neutral Question you may have: What is a carbon neautralization package? Is it something that can only be purchased at Star Trek conventions? Answer: These packages plant trees to help absorb the nastiness left in the air from your flight to the Maldives. It will also calculate how much CO2 you emit on flights based on your destination as well as CO2 you emit with your car mileage. It's a smart site, easy to use and I feel more green-angelic just for looking at it. We're taking the Eurostar/TGV to a wedding in the south of France in 2 weeks rather than flying but we still have all of those air miles to make up for from our London-NY-San Fran-LA-London trip so looks like we'll be using this site's offerings to help to plant a small forest somewhere. (Though I do wonder how ...

TGV - how energy efficient is it really?

We took another holiday, using the TGV instead of flying as our mode of transport, in August, as our attempts to keep air miles down continues. But as we zoomed through the French countryside at 180 MPH, we wondered how efficient is the TGV, really? Or have we just bought into the hype that it is more efficient than flying? I've never seen any statistics other than soft evidence provided by The Guardian and various news sources. We've been told by journalists that train travel is significantly greener, but with the electricity required to hurl a TGV through the countryside, and electricity plants being a major contributor to green house gases, what was a real, non-hype comparison? Or was my sudden skepticism just an excuse to trade the 5 1/2 hours on the stuffy train in for 1 hour on a plane? (Always fun going down and an absolute pain coming back.) With a little investigating, I found some statistical information comparing the efficiency of various modes of transport, based...

The problem with flying

Everyone who knows me knows that I hate flying. It's loud, uncomfortable, confining and if things go wrong there's no way out. (I'm an advocate of parachutes under seat, not inflatable vests.) But the real reason I hate flying these days is the environmental impact. a) Apparently you're better off driving to your destination, alone , even if it's thousands of miles away, than being on a full plane. That's how bad the fuel consumption is. b) Planes dump their emissions in the most delicate part of the stratosphere and there's nothing to help mitigate the damage. For all of the pollution cars create, we have our plant life down here to help soften the blow. c) They are noisy, booming things and no matter where we go, we seem to be able to hear one or see one, even the far hills of Scotland. d) The amount of packaging they use per passenger is amazing. When my husband recently flew on a short haul flight to Amsterdam, he asked the air steward if they recy...

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