This weekend, a friend of ours commented on the environmental impact of the Toyota Prius, in which the Prius compares unfavorably to the discontinued H2. We’ve heard this claim before, but didn’t know where those claims started, nor what they were really based on other than fingering the Prius’ larger battery as the culprit. It turns out, this myth was started by CNW Marketing Research, in a study that was thoroughly debunked several times since it made the rounds. Slate has a good article up from 2008 which challenges CNW’s claims:

[CNW] posits that the vast majority of a car’s cradle-to-grave energy gets expended during production. That assertion runs contrary to virtually every other analysis of vehicular life cycles, including those conducted by MIT and Argonne National Laboratory.

If you think about it, the Prius is just a smaller vehicle compared to something like the H2, and so should, accordingly, have a much smaller environmental footprint. The only differentiating factor is the hybrid engine, in which the core component, the battery, is capable of being the lone smoking gun. When it comes to the battery, nickel is the element cited as having the most negative environmental impact, but it would seem that the impact is not so great so as to offset the difference between the Prius and H2.

Another major part of the anti-Prius meme is that the car’s battery uses 32 pounds of nickel, mined in Sudbury, Ontario. The skeptical e-mails often state that Sudbury is an environmental wasteland that resembles “a surrealistic scene from the depths of hell.” That assertion might have been true about three decades ago, long before the Prius. Nickel mining is by no means a clean endeavor, but Sudbury’s conditions have improved in recent years. On top of that, all cars contain nickel in their frames—the Hummer’s frame, for example, has twice as much nickel as the Prius’.

Ultimately, claims that a ridiculously fuel-inefficient vehicle like the H2 has less of an environmental impact than Toyota’s hybrid flagship is just anti-Prius propaganda used to justify buying a vehicle that gets around 10 MPG. Meanwhile, in real-world conditions, our Prius doesn’t strain to get over 50 MPG in mixed driving conditions, with our best full-to-empty tank to date coming in at just under 58 MPG. That’s none too shabby. Still, it’s a shame that over three years later, the Prius vs. H2 myth is still out there.

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The question of a paleo/primal diet being sustainable for the world’s population is a recurring one over at PaleoHacks. The issue is simple: if we remove grains from the diet, a staple of pretty much every poor country out there, then how can we realistically replace those calories with food that do meet paleo/primal standards. And really, the answer is simple: we can’t.

On a recent trip to rural Georgia, we realized just how different shopping for groceries is. While you can pick up some organic produce from grocery stores or local farmers, finding grass-fed meat is a total impossibility, save for maybe locating a specific farmer and sourcing meat through a non-traditional channel. The point is, for the average person, a paleo/primal diet is much more difficult to adhere to outside of certain geographic areas, and that’s within the United States. We consider ourselves fortunate to have a nearby Whole Foods market that makes acquiring most paleo/primal staples easy, without having to necessarily rely on farmers markets and direct customer-to-farmer bargaining. And if it’s more difficult to get paleo/primal foods outside the United States than it is in rural Georgia, then obviously transitioning to a worldwide diet that’s paleo/primal friendly isn’t easy. In fact, we’re not sure it’s possible at all.

At least, it’s not possible at the world’s current population levels. But should that stop you from eating paleo/primal?

Our argument is simple: if the food most nutritious for human survival is available to us, and not to everyone else, we will still eat it. Why should we abstain from the healthiest foods, and even eat damaging foods, simply to mimic what the rest of the world has access to? Should we really make rice and beans a staple in our diet simply because those foods are easiest for the masses to procure? After all, we don’t live in a shoddy hut that lacks electricity, we watch HD television, and spend too much money on redundant internet access¹.

So to those who would argue against paleo/primal merely because it’s unsustainable globally, you’re probably a hypocrite already. But for those who live in a first-world country that does have access to paleo/primal foods, or could, then the sustainability argument against paleo/primal foods isn’t even a good one. The current Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) that are the mainstay of US meat consumption could be replaced with a more sustainable method, and one that’s compliant with organic, sustainable agriculture. Atop the vapid consumption of processed fast food that’s literally destroying the population’s health at epidemic-level proportions, it’s unethical to argue a diet that could deliver considerable benefits to our population’s health on the grounds that it’s not a viably sustainable diet worldwide.

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The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight introduced us to Thom Hartmann’s concept of Older and Younger Cultures, the differences between the two being rather stark. In Hartmann’s view, Older Cultures embody sustainability and peaceful existence, which Easy to be Green summarizes thusly:

• Political Independence
• Egalitarian Structure
• Getting their resources from renewable local sources
• Having a unique sense of their own identity
• Respecting the identity of other tribes

Compare this to the synopsis of Younger Culture, which is the culture that modern humans subscribe to:

• Political Dominance
• Established hierarchy: clear authority structures
• Acquiring resources through trade and conquest
• Absorbing other cultures into their own identity
• Genocidal warfare against others

Hartmann obviously idolizes Older Culture, and for good reason: there are many benefits to following an Older Culture lifestyle, which is realized by some Younger Culture members who decide to live greener, steer clear of commercialism, focus on eating “real food,” etc. But a major component of Hartmann’s differentiation between Younger and Older Cultures is the emphasis on war and conflict, which Hartmann minimizes when he describes Older Culture.To be fair, it’s common to see our ancient ancestors painted in this light: being close to the natural world, respecting all living things, and only occasionally being involved in conflict with neighboring tribes. But something about Hartmann’s portrayal that such conflict was usually non-fatal doesn’t sit well with us. Perhaps it’s a pessimistic view of human nature on our part, but while we acknowledge that Younger Culture may inherently be more violent than Older Culture, we don’t accept that Older Culture was somehow lacking these elements.

We’re currently reading Them+Us by Danny Vendramini, which thus far is an excellent read. Without going into too much detail, Them+Us details a theory of human evolution that relies on what Vendramini calls the Neandertal Predation Theory, wherein Vendramini describes our Neandertal cousins as apex predators that early homo sapiens ran into during our early settlement of the Levant. Vendramini points out that other primates (also typically painted as generally peaceful) are not without violent intent, as they participate in both coalitionary killing (group-based, violent encounters) as well as lethal raiding (targeted violence at a neighbor’s location). Vendramini points out that Neandertals were likely to share these traits with modern primates, just as we humans possess them today.

The take-away is that Hartmann may be correct in saying that warfare as we know it today was not practiced in Older Cultures¹, as the notion of a standing army simply doesn’t make sense in such a setting. But to disavow extremely violent behavior in Older Cultures is a disservice to what we are: animals. That’s not to say that this behavior is necessarily logical in the sense that we may think it from a “civilized” perspective, but it’s still instinctual behavior that stems from something, and similar behavior can be seen in animals today, primates included. That something can be as simple as basic survival, such as fending off predators or even to provide food in a time of limited resources. Other times, that something may be more complex, because when we see the behavior in modern primates or even wolf populations, lethal raiding doesn’t always make sense, and the targets of violence can appear isolated from previous interactions with the aggressor. Regardless, it seems that limited violence is at the core of our species, however unethical our minds tell us it is.

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In The New York Times, Nicolette Hahn Niman proposes five things the government can do to help stop cruel and abusive animal practices in the US. All are excellent suggestions, but the last we find most interesting:

The United States should launch a domestic Peace Corps for farming. America needs to repopulate rural America and stimulate beneficial jobs for young people. Our nation struggles with unemployment, and yet traditional farming is disappearing partly because it is more labor intensive. Training the next generation in sustainable agriculture and assisting them to start new farms could be a brave president’s boldest and most lasting initiative.

Combined with the first four examples, this idea is a fantastic one. The problem, of course, is that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is subject to the lobbyists who promote big business, and are woefully negligent on sustainability in agriculture, and even nutrition. A government-funded Farmers Corps would have to work alongside the USDA, but a non-profit, non-government organization (NGO) could work contrary to USDA recommendations (corn subsidies, et al) and yet still help boost the economy and environment.

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Since switching to a “paleo” diet, we’ve increased our consumption of beef, and a common criticism we’ve heard as a result is that eating beef is not sustainable. Specific arguments include:

1. Raising cows is a direct cause of desertification.

2. The massive demand for beef promotes slash-and-burn of rain-forests.

3. By some estimates, 2500 gallons of water are needed to produce a single pound of beef.

4. The amount of methane produced by cows is a large contributing factor to the production of CO2 in our atmosphere, thus contributing to global warming. Plus, some of this methane seeps into groundwater, which poisons the earth.

At first glance, these arguments may seem valid, until you realize that they are primarily aimed at Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO), and not towards grass-fed, pastured livestock. That’s an important difference, because the paleo community’s emphasis on meat consumption is all about the latter. This then begs the question as to how we can respond to the aforementioned points from a paleo perspective, seeing as grassfed, pastured livestock doesn’t come with all the issues that meat derived from CAFO does.

Desertification.

Ethically-raised pastured cows have been shown to reverse desertification in several instances, thanks to the cow’s natural fertilizer that re-energizes the ground. In fact, it’s been shown in Africa that land previously devastated by agriculture (in which the land was no longer fertile enough to support further vegetation for agricultural purposes), could drastically change after the introduction of livestock. Livestock ate remaining grass/weeds, re-fertilized the earth with their feces, and ultimately restored the soil to support agriculture. Proper land management in which livestock and agricultural fields are iteratively rotated through grazing areas allows for a sustainable environment. Only when livestock are not rotated, or when restricted by CAFO, is there an issue of desertification. In fact, without livestock, the only way to prevent desertification in an agricultural environment is to rely on chemical fertilizers or less efficient crop rotations.

Slash-and-burn.

Destruction of rain-forests in order to propagate CAFO is an unethical practice that is counter to grass-fed meat production. The issue here is that corporate greed establishes poor practices that are bound in the CAFO philosophy. Arguably, there’s a lot of land that could be used domestically for animal grazing, a lot of which has undergone desertification due to poor agricultural practices. The destruction of rain-forests in order to support the meat industry is less an argument against meat, and more an argument against corporate greed and unethical animal treatment.

Water use.

Estimates for water use required to produce beef varies considerably. It’s not clear, however, which factors are involved in each computation. While they imply that the water use is based on what an animal needs to drink in its lifetime before it’s butchered, it actually includes the irrigation needs of corn crops.

There’s no indication that these studies differentiate between CAFO and grazing operations, and we have to assume they refer to the former, since that’s the conventional meat-producing method. While CAFO relies on large corn crops to feed animals, grass-fed, pastured operations do not, so we can deduct those water values from the equation. Further, since many small, independent farms slaughter their animals on-sight, we can further reduce water needs because the vast amounts of water used in commercial slaughterhouses is no longer relevant¹.

Methane.

Some argue that cow production of methane may pollute as much as a car, daily. However, this is in great part due to what we’re feeding cows; natural pasture does not result in the same amount of methane production, whereas ryegrass and other chemically-fertilized pasture is not as nutritious, and results in increased methane production.

As per our response to the issue of desertification, the concern over ground contaminants (ammonia, etc) is a non-issue as long as proper grazing rotations are utilized; cow fertilizer actually benefits the earth, and the resulting soil actually traps more carbon than the cows create. Obviously, this relies on proper herd and field management, but that’s the very practices that we need to support, instead of sourcing our meat from CAFO.

Eat grass-fed meat.

Many of the arguments about beef not being sustainable is in regards to conventional cow rearing, and not necessarily applicable to grass-fed cows. CAFO needs to be eliminated, even if that means not eating at McDonalds, or getting access to other cheap sources of meat.

But in the end, even if we begin replacing CAFO with grass-fed operations, is the system sustainable? It is insofar as as the production of nutritious meat goes, but ultimately, there’s no diet that’s both healthy and sustainable for the current human population. Growing grains to support the 6+ billion people on the earth today is only damaging the environment, and results in a growing autoimmune epidemic.

From the perspective of healthy eating domestically, however, there’s no reason that we can’t eat sustainable grass-fed beef at home, without worrying about negative environmental impact.

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On recommendation, we started reading The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann, a book over a decade old (though a revised version was released in 2004). We point out the book’s age because it’s only a relatively recent phenomenon to hear the media actually address environmental concerns like global warming, and few people are aware that alarms began to sound long before the green, eco-bandwagon started gaining momentum only a few years ago. Sure, people may have scoffed at fringe commune-living hippies who made similar warnings, but the reality is that academics have been warning of what we now call “peak oil” for years. In the forward to the book, for example, mention is made of a BP employee back in the 70s who expressed concern for the dwindling oil supply beneath the earth’s surface, and stressed that alternative fuels needed further research, since we would inevitably have to rely on them. His concerns, of course, we ultimately drowned out by the noise of capitalism.

We’re not far into the book yet, but even after a mere 50 pages, Hartmann makes numerous valid points about the state of the world, and how the world’s population is simply not sustainable. Given an agricultural infrastructure not dependent on fossil fuels, Hartmann estimates that our planet can sustain less than one billion people (it’s currently home to 6.8 billion people), and that’s already pushing it. But realistically, how does one justify culling over 85% of the world’s population by ignoring their inevitable decline to famine, and somehow enforce limits on childbirth domestically? If privacy advocates today can’t even come to terms with government-instituted counterterrorism measures that arguably infringe some people’s rights to private telecommunications, then how will they ever come to terms with measures aimed at preventing population gain? Every conceivable action that could be mandated (birth licenses, enforced sterilization, et al) are all unpopular ideas for what we consider reasonable in a free society, but who can realistically argue that population growth should be allowed to continue, and that couples should feel free to have more than one or two children?

The conundrum isn’t just about ethical or moral concerns, it’s about practical survival. Even if you think global warming is a sham (which places you in a fringe group yourself), you can’t argue the basic premise of peak oil, even if you place the date of peak oil decades into the future; the earth contains a limited supply of fossil fuels, and we’ve tapped those reserves (which took thousands upon thousands of years to be created) in a span of a couple hundred years (and not slowly, either). Ultimately, arguing over the date of peak oil (or coal, or any other fossil fuel) is akin to arguing whether it was four or six or eight million people killed in the Holocaust; the number itself doesn’t matter, because a great travesty has occurred regardless, and measures need to be taken to prevent it from happening again. As far as the environment and humanity is concerned, this means weaning mankind off of fossil fuels and drastically downsizing the human footprint on the earth, even if that means figuring out a way to depopulate the planet to a manageable one billion people or less.

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The 2010 Toyota Prius IV isn’t the type of automobile that car aficionados lust after. Rather, it’s the type of car that those who only want to get from Point A to Point B will love because it’s fuel efficient and reminiscent of a luxury sedan. That’s not to say that it is a luxury vehicle, because it’s not, but the Prius IV has a number of comfort features that aim to impress: heated leather seats, good sound system, rear-view camera, sun roof, and vent-powering solar panel.

(Let’s clarify for a moment: we’re talking about the Prius IV, not the more basic I, II, or III packages. The differences between these may be slight, but to be fair, it’s the IV and V that are reminiscent of a luxury car, whereas the other packages can be significantly more spartan.)

It’s a hybrid.

For us, coming off a Volkswagen R32, the difference in performance is significant. The trade-off is obvious, however: a more quiet ride, with twice the mileage per tank and half the price. That trade-off may not be appealing if you’re prone to aggressive driving with open stretches, but in metropolitan areas where traffic patterns are dense, with fun escapes from this traffic being rare, then having a car without much oomph isn’t a huge issue, as long as basic driver comfort is met. And here, the Prius IV delivers fairly well.

And let’s be honest, that twice-the-distance-half-the-price thing is pretty awesome. With basic unleaded gas (87), we’re talking $25 for a fill-up, which gets us over 500 miles of range. Considering that the only other car to do that is the now-discontinued and very compact original Honda Insight, the Prius naturally wins the MPG race, and does so packing more people/stuff.

When we first looked at the 2010 Prius, the salesperson was keen on pointing out that the car had three driving modes. One was the “EV” mode, for forcing the car to run only on the battery. “Eco” mode was next, for focusing on best gas mileage. Third was “power” mode, for getting more juice to the wheels. Let’s be fair, though: in real-world use, you’re only going to use the second mode most of the time, because power mode doesn’t really add that much spin to your wheels, and EV mode shuts itself off when you go beyond a certain speed/acceleration, or if the air conditioner is up in high gear. So really, EV mode may be fine for just cruising around the parking lot, and maybe you’ll push the power mode button when trapped between two trailers on the freeway, but slowing down to a snail’s pace or putting the petal to the metal as it were accomplishes both of these things as well; eco-mode will automatically draw power only from the battery at low speeds, and provide more juice from the engine when needed. Perhaps giving consumers the perception of micromanagement is helping sales, but these options feel almost silly to us.

We assume that for power-management purposes, Toyota pulled the daytime running lights from the Prius, despite the fact that models such as the Matrix come standard with this feature: it’s a safety feature, after all. We can’t imagine that the power draw is that big of an issue, especially since the car will never be sucking battery juice exclusively when not cruising a parking lot. The mystery continues when you forget to leave the Prius’ lights on when the car is off, because unlike most other cars on the market now, the Prius doesn’t complain with an audible beep – the lights just stay on.

A cool family car.

The Prius IV is now considered an intermediate sized-car, up from the “compact” footprint that hybrids were previously known for. With four doors and adequate cabin room to fill the back seats, the Prius can make for a good family car, whether that means you have kids or just a backseat-filling dog. The rear seats fold down completely, and by “completely” we mean that they don’t angle upwards towards the front of the cabin, so sliding furniture or boxes or whatever else in is easy. There’s also no drop behind a lip when the trunk is open, again making for easy loading and unloading of whatever you plan to haul around. This is a solid hatch-back feature, and it’s a wonder that other car companies haven’t come around to this, as it really complements the already-spacious interior.

Locks on the Prius IV are keyless, as is starting the engine. There’s a key-fab that’s proximity-based, so as long as the fab is on your person, you can lock and unlock doors just by touching the car’s door handle(s). It’s a nice feature with a physical override in the event that you key-fab’s battery dies, and the effect of keyless entry is another space-age touch that makes the Prius cool.

Inside, the Prius doesn’t disappoint aesthetically – the dash is full of sexy, mesmerizing LCDs, letting you see where the car’s power is currently coming from (battery or engine), and not even displaying things such as RPMs, as most people could care less about this in the first place. This is indicative of the Prius’ market: not gear-heads, but people who appreciate a clean interface and straightforward usability. Were it not for the lack of little touches here or there, the Prius could almost be considered the Macintosh of cars.

Unfortunately, as space-age looking as the interior is, it’s not perfectly polished: the leather trim is minimal beyond the seats, with much of the dash and doors trimmed in a hard, patterned plastic. It doesn’t look bad, but it doesn’t look as clean as leather either, and while likely more durable in the long run, it doesn’t feel particularly robust when giving some areas a slight push and not feeling much resistance.

The car’s climate controls are nice, but aimed at the front seats. Rear passengers have it tough during very hot or very cold weather, because there are no rear vents – not even under the seats. Even our R32 which had little space in the back seats had vents beneath the front seats and at the rear of the center console. That the Prius, which is a larger car aimed more at a family market doesn’t have this, is almost ludicrous. “But WyldKard, we’ve had cars for decades without rear vents, and our rear passengers have made out just fine. ” We’ve made out fine without power steering for decades too, but that doesn’t mean modern cars should shirk this feature today.

The nav-stereo.

The stereo with built-in navigation is pretty good considering just how poor most stock navigation systems are. The downside is that a number of features are disabled when the car is in motion, such as entering an address or manipulating bluetooth controls for wirelessly connecting to, say, an iPhone. The nice thing is that none of these features require add-ons, which was the case with our R32 and bluetooth telephony. It’s pretty stupid for a car manufacturer to disable features temporarily under the guise of safety, however, when real-world use cases mean that a passenger should be able to use the navigation equipment when the car is in motion. In this sense, it’s rather sad that the car detects the presence of a passenger for the purpose of enabling the passenger airbag, but that this same detection mechanism isn’t used to unlock navigation controls.

The stereo itself is good – not as good sounding as the premium system that came stock in our previous 2005 Ford Mustang GT, but with adequate base nonetheless. Control-wise, the Prius IV’s stereo is fantastic, and truly shows how much better touch-screen interfaces are than the pitiful controls on our R32 were. Surely, it’s no iOS interface still, but it’s better than much of the competition.

Speaking of iOS, the Prius IV’s stereo connects to iOS devices via A2DP, letting you listen to any audio from an iOS device (not just from the iPod app), as well as letting you make and receive calls using the car’s speaker system. Thus far, no one we’ve talked to in this manner even knew we were calling from the car, and assumed we were using our Jawbone headset or stock iOS hardware. So good and convenient are these calls, that we haven’t recharged our bluetooth headset since setting the car’s bluetooth connection up.

Unfortunately, while the bluetooth connectivity is solid 80% of the time, there’s the occasional glitch. Normally, as soon as we turn the car on, bluetooth connectivity is achieved and playback from whatever audio app we used last resumes, be it from the iPod app or Pandora. Every once in awhile, however, we have to run through a couple menus to get bluetooth to work properly, and while even rarer, there are times that bluetooth playback of our music suddenly stops, and we have to disconnect the device manually and reconnect it using the car’s stereo interface (when the car is stopped). We don’t know where the problem lies, as it may be an issue with Apple’s bluetooth implementation or Toyota’s, but it’s annoying either way. Fortunately, the only time we regularly have to touch the car’s bluetooth settings is when ours was not the last device used, such as if our significant other used the Prius with her iPhone. In those cases, when we start the car up, we have to tell it to look for our iPhone instead, but then we’re off five seconds later with streaming audio goodness.

Mandatory conclusion paragraph.

We didn’t get a chance to play around with previous Prius incarnations, but judging the car on it’s 2010 build, the Prius IV is every bit as comfortable as other “premium” cars in its price range. What you give up is base performance, but most families don’t care about raw performance as much as safety anyway. What they care about is getting from one place to another, and these days, doing it as cheaply as possible. Raw fuel savings may not be spectacular compared to a cheaper, non-hybrid car that’s still considered fuel efficient, but the Prius epitomizes fuel efficiency in a package that greenies can put on a pedestal for not supporting terrorism and being slightly more earth-friendly.

While the Prius still takes top honors among “alternate fuel vehicles,” we realize that’s partially because the respective roster is so thin right now. As this roster grows, the Prius will have to keep getting better, not just in respect to its hybrid engine, but in terms of features and polish as well. Right now, the Prius IV is slightly above middle-ground when it comes to in-car comfort, meaning that Toyota has a solid platform for building more budget-oriented vehicles, or more premium models. Whether the Prius maintains its position as Toyota’s flagship standard for hybrids remains to be seen, but with only a little more polish, we easily see it holding its ground for the immediate future, especially if other titans like Honda aren’t able to quickly capitalize on hybrid technology (e.g. the Insight’s sad resurrection).

Oh, also, the Prius’ brakes seem to work fine, in case you were wondering.

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Granted, America is a place where people tend to buy things they want rather than need, or often, can even afford, but let’s not go down that road. Instead, let’s look at a point Trent recently made over at The Simple Dollar:

A few years ago, there was a very widely circulated statistic from the National Association of Home Builders about the increase in home sizes over the last sixty years. According to their numbers, the average American home grew from 983 square feet in 1950 to 2,434 square feet in 2005.

For those who don’t want to do the math, that’s almost a 250% increase in home sizes over the course of 50 years. This begs the question as to whether or not this kind of increase is really necessary, or if it’s simply a reflection of the typical homeowner wanting to show off their spoils, even if these spoils are little more than real-estate gluttony.

When one looks at the chief differences in lifestyle from the 1950s to the modern era, a couple things spring to mind. For one, it’s become less common for middle-class children to share one room. Two, entertainment centers, namely televisions, have increased substantially in size from the 1950s, suggesting that home living rooms should become longer. Thirdly, with the widespread proliferation of vehicles, with most dual-income households having two cars, space required to park them has no doubt increased.

Still, the 250% bump in size isn’t warranted even with these considerations; a separate bedroom for a second child adds less than 150 square feet in most cases. For a big-screen LCD television, the viewing distance of approximately 10 feet, at most, should certainly add less than 100 square feet to even a modest living room, and we’d need even less than that to bump up the size of a one-car garage to be two-car friendly. In other words, the rampant bloat of houses today is simply unpurposeful, unless one is content with the realization that larger homes basically serve as easy-access storage for one’s acquired junk.

With smaller homes comes a built-in need for less materialism. That’s the simple truth when one stays away from buying, say, unnecessary kitchen gadgets because one’s kitchen simply isn’t big enough to house them. That’s on top of the savings from requiring less energy to heat or cool one’s smaller residence. Recently, a friend told us about the 208 light-bulbs required to light their home. Yes, 208. No home for a couple and one child should require that many light-bulbs, especially a home advertised as “Energy Star compliant.” Any good one has done by buying into the Energy Star label is immediately undone by compounding one’s energy needs, whether those needs are served by CFLs or not. We don’t know if LEED certification takes into account the energy needs of a single housing “unit,” but at least LEED certification still means something considering that Energy Star is merely a rough guide for a single energy-using widget. If one doubles the widgets in one’s home, the fact that they’re both Energy Star compliant does not make the duo energy efficient.

While there are many arguments for larger homes, few actually make sense in the end. Even the guest room argument, for example, falls short when one considers the cost of having the extra room in the long-run versus the sum of hotel expenses for occasional visitors.

Of course, this whole discussion would be moot if people invested in slightly larger properties instead of larger houses. This would at least create more space to help green the community, allow space for children to play on, and even to grow gardens. And, unless one lives in the deep south where couches and old appliances can easily be found scattered on one’s front lawn, smaller houses with larger properties would help us minimize the junk we keep around.

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On a daily basis, it seems that the media wants everyone to believe that the American way of life has ended. There are even comparisons, frequently so, about the state of the U.S. today and the state it was in during the Great Depression. There are even some who are convinced that we’re in a depression, and not a simple recession. Meanwhile, even grasping that the economy has turned down of late, we still wonder what the majority of the fuss is about. There are no bread-lines, people, and we are not living in a dust bowl!

Fortunately, more eloquent sense comes from Trent at The Simple Dollar, who agrees that the media is not the best source for information about the financial crisis they keep shouting about. When one breaks down the numbers, things certainly seem less scary:

…the actual unemployment rate changed from 4.9% to 7.2% from December 2006 to December 2007 – a difference of 2.3%. In other words, out of every 100 people I know, two more should be unemployed right now than a year ago – and that’s pretty accurate.

What about consumer spending? Most accounts have consumer spending dropping about 4% during 2008, which makes it appear to be a truly terrible year. However, what’s being left out of that picture is that 2008 had virtually no inflation – almost every other year has at least 3% inflation, which artificially boosts that consumer spending number. In a year with normal inflation, the consumer spending would have appeared unchanged and thus there would be little or no panic about it.

Our experiences are similar to Trent’s: those we know who, during the period of this purported financialpocalypse, lost their jobs, managed to find new ones rather quickly. At present, only a couple people we know haven’t found gainful employment, but that’s not necessarily because jobs don’t exist. Rather, jobs they want don’t exist, but that can be true even when the economy is doing well. (For example, one friend quit her job because she wanted to find a better one on the opposite coast. One friend who lost his job found a better paying one within a couple weeks. And another friend who remains unemployed has turned down a number of admittedly shitty jobs, but has still received job offers.

That’s not to say that very fundamental lifestyle changes shouldn’t take effect in the U.S. To the contrary, Americans are consumers of the worst degree, with absolutely no comprehension of sustainability or future impact. That’s in great part because for the last hundred years, Americans have managed to piss away money on consumer goods, and live a disposable lifestyle that simply cannot exist long-term. This goes hand-in-hand with financial sustainability, and why we urge the new Presidential administration to pimp, quite severely, a green infrastructure. While such an initiative is certainly no magical bullet, it would certainly steer the U.S. in the right direction, and with firm lifestyle education beside it, will ensure we don’t succumb to our man-made cancers.

In the meantime, stop comparing today with the Great Depression. It’s just… depressing.

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According to the Washington Street Journal, “green” company Dell is, at best, doing a bit of green washing, what with their declarations of being the first carbon neutral computer company. The truth is, Dell’s not very green at all. In fact, Dell hasn’t take considerable strides in environmental sustainability at all, and though they’re purchasing environmental credits, what they should be doing is overhauling how their products are made and distributed, and how their buildings are powered.

Again, it’s great that some thought has been put into a cleaner environment by Dell, but considering Dell’s size and profit margin, there’s no reason consumers shouldn’t expect much, much more.

As we noted in the past, computers are inherently not green, but that’s in great part because of industry-made decisions, not because they couldn’t be wholly cleaner to produce. And really, it’s a shame that the media often paints companies like Apple and Dell as greening their practices, when what we’re seeing are baby steps at best. That slow start should certainly be expected, but it’s time to pick up some steam, and low-power LCDs are not the only course to be taken.

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