Hot, Flat, and Crowded Post 4

This week in my reading Thomas Friedman introduces some possible solutions to our environmental crisis. He points to the Toyota Prius because of its ability to store the energy from braking and from rolling down hills, “…Toyota was able to move from an incremental change in miles per gallon to a quantum leap-a car that could generate some of its own energy” (Friedman 185). I think that this is brilliant. If we ever were to have electric cars then the main problem would be how to charge it, but how many times a day do people stop when they are on the road? I can count almost 20 stops just between my house and the high school alone along with several hills. We can also take this a step further; how many times a day do we open doors? If we were to apply the same technology to our doors, we could generate electricity just from opening and closing them. Obviously it wouldn’t be enough to power your entire house for a day, but every bit counts. It all comes down to lifestyle changes. We can all easily recycle and take many other steps to help green our lives, but not everyone does. Friedman talks along these same lines,
Telling every individual on the planet who wants or can afford a car that they cannot have one would be changing our lifestyle. But banning cars over a certain weight or engine size, or bringing maximum speed limits back down to 55 miles per hour, or banning taxis that are not hybrids-such efforts do not strike me as fundamentally cramping anyone’s lifestyle…Telling people that they cannot have an iPod or laptop would certainly involve changing our lifestyle. But requiring all iPods and laptops to be made with recyclable materials doesn’t strike me as fundamentally cramping anyone’s style (193).
Some of the things we can do are so simple and yet we do not do them. He makes great points about the difference between an inconvenience and something that is very easy to undertake. After all no one needs a hummer or an iPod, but they are nice things to have as long as they be recycled. If every person in the world bought an iPod and threw it away in three years, where does it end up? Since very few if any of the parts are recyclable it will just lie in a heap for many years. Later Friedman argues that green revolution has been far too commercialized,
We have too many Live Earth concerts and Barneys “Have a Green Holiday” Christmas catalogs and too few focused lobbying efforts to enact transformational green legislation. If the money and mobilization effort spent on Live Earth had gone into lobbying the U.S. Congress for more generous and long-term production and investment tax credits for renewable energy, and for other green legislation, the impact would have been vastly more meaningful” (206).
I think he brings up an excellent point. If you just watch 5 minutes of commercials, you see tons of products advertised as “green.” Companies are using it as a way to bring in customers. I don’t think it is bad that companies are trying to do their part to help the environment and I’m sure some are doing more than enough, but is a Barney Holiday card really going to help fix our problems? It would be a better use of money and would certainly attract my attention if a corporation used the money and the effort to help the Congress get green legislation passed.