PS&L Blog

My grandparents lived in Juniata, one of the nice row house neighborhoods of Philadelphia. When I was a kid, my family would drive our one car down to visit them from the suburbs. I used to think it was cool that when we finished our visit that our car was covered in soot. This was in the early ‘60’s and the soot came from the coal powered electric plant near their house.

So much has changed since then. Their neighborhood is run down, and the neighborhood where I grew up is not the suburbs anymore. The coal fired power plant is gone, but there’s still soot. It comes from the 2 to 4 cars for every house and all the dirt that we create. Yuck.

At lunch today I was talking with my friend Dennis about the green movement. His general comment was that money and economics drive everything, not regulation or policy. If we want to decrease fuel use, increase its price. Really high gas prices will force people to drive smaller more fuel efficient cars, take more public transportation and create a whole class of people that will try to make money by helping people get around affordably.

Maybe he’s right, but when it all about money or economics, greed usually creeps in. In Europe, where they already have really high gas prices, smaller cars and better public transportation they have scandals over people stealing carbon footprint credits

When I point this out to Dennis, he just says, “It’s all good,” and then he switches topics. It won’t be easy as we struggle towards a greener future for all of us. Hopefully we’ll keep our sense of humor as we move forward.

Here are some carbon fun facts from http://www.nature.org/

# The average footprint for people in United States is 20.40 metric tons
# The average for the industrial nations is about 11 metric tons
# The average worldwide carbon footprint is about 4 metric tons
# The worldwide target to combat climate change is 2 metric tons