Happy Earth Day

For someone involved in a "green" business, I have become pretty jaded with Earth Day. When major corporation jump on the bandwagon, I become cynical. Is Exxon putting green dye in their unleaded premium? Even President Bush has an offering, albeit an extremely lousy one.

This is Easter for the Green Church, when all the missing flock puts on their best suits and tries to beat their neighbors to the altar for Communion. Yes, the guy with the Hummer parked diagonally across two parking spaces right next to the door. I guess I'll park my Prius in the far lot and walk the rest of the way. Don't mind if I'm late - it's just that I heard this sermon before.

Some of you might be upset that I criticized President Bush, right? Maybe I shouldn't criticize him because doing something is better than doing nothing after all! Well, I don't agree that he is "doing something."

When you tell someone that the United States will cease INCREASING emissions of greenhouse gases by such and such a date, if they are not paying attention, they might interpret that to mean that the United States is DECREASING emissions of carbon dioxide, which, according to the current administration, is not a pollutant anyway (I couldn't find the appropriate symbol to insert here to express cynical laughter.) If you really look at what President Bush is implying here, the United States is giving a big green light to power plants to actually spew even more pollutants into the atmosphere well into the future - He is not even trying to hold the current levels of emissions at their status quo. Most scientists warn that if we hold to the status quo, we will be on the road to climate disaster, but that's not good enough for this travesty of an administration.

How can we be so ambivalent about this as a nation? Are we waiting for the final results of the experiment to be announced? (Watch this video explaining how we are in the test tube waiting for the results.) To paraphrase the video, if during World War II we had waited to see if Hitler was really trying to develop an atomic bomb of his own before throwing a huge investment into the Manhattan Project, we wouldn't be having this debate in English right now. Why are we so passive now when the stakes MIGHT be just as high? (They might not, but does anybody want to take that gamble? What is there to win if you are right? What is there to lose if you are wrong? Read about Pascal's Wager to get a better feel of that line of reasoning.)

That's enough now - it's 12:02 AM and therefore no longer Earth Day on the East Coast of the United States.

If anybody feels guilty of their ecological sins, they can buy some indulgences in the form of Renewable Fuel Credits from the many online sellers of this ethereal product.

As for myself, I'll go peddle some electric scooters I am offering on my online store and make a toast to commercialism. Hey, at least they're easy on gas...