Green Leaf Report

It’s become quite a popular movement to reduce your personal carbon footprint and minimize your impact on the earth.  But that isn’t the lack of impact I refer in my title- I’m concerned about our government’s apparent desire to do nothing of any importance to help the environment.  Please read Bucking Court, EPA won’t […]

  Dr. James Hansen originally spoke in front of a Congressional committee on global warming in 1988.  He’s updated his warning with an eye-opening report on the current risks facing our planet.  The part that keeps running through my mind is where he suggests the heads of fossil fuel companies should be tried for their […]

At the WindPower 2008 conference I spoke with a University student from North Carolina manning the North Carolina Renewable Energy booth.  He was part of a community outreach program for solar and wind; when I asked him how that was going for him, he said people in North Carolina tended to complain in the […]

Unfortunately, the Exxon Mobil shareholders meeting in Dallas yesterday was unsuccessful in splitting the chairman and CEO roles, achieving only 39.5% of the vote.  Several shareholders groups are angry at Exxon Mobil’s lack of investment in alternative fuels, and think Exxon Mobil is short-sighted in its reliance on oil.  Shareholders - including members of the […]

Sometimes the small things in life can be the most annoying. For example, when visiting the local cafeteria, why do they serve meals onto Styrofoam clamshell packages instead of onto washable, reusable plates?  A friend of mine asked one day, and was told: “We can’t use these Styrofoam containers in California anymore, so they […]

So President  Bush has been out stumping in Saudi Arabia asking them to pump out more of their non-renewable oil resources so that America can have temporarily lowered prices.  I guess if the Saudis complied, that plan would work for lowering prices at least until the Saudis ran out of oil and/or Bush was no […]

 A while back I went to a women’s networking event and at the beginning we were asked our names, businesses and pet peeves. I thought at the time that this was an awfully negative way to start an event, but now I clearly remember some of those women and the things that bother them, so […]

Yesterday I met with the work/life coordinator at my employer and continued to encourage telecommuting.  I’m building the call to action for our website; now the challenge is to work this through the required approvals.  It still feels like I keep hearing that telecommuting is a privilege for specific persons in specific roles, not an entitlement.  I don’t want to […]

 I’m trying to figure out how Bush’s recent meeting with Saudi’s leadership asking OPEC to increase oil production makes any sense to OPEC.  The underlying argument appears to be that if the oil prices get too high, it will hurt the US economy and we’ll buy less oil.  So why should OPEC care?  If they […]

The recent front page issue for local and national newspapers has been the possibility of another recession.  Everyone is worried, it’s the talk of the office, the worry of managers.  What does it really mean?  Certainly, since 2007 we’ve seen the  continued increasing of oil/gas and heating costs, as well as the meltdown of the […]

I heard an interesting pet peeve today: 14 cars idling in line at the drive-through window for Starbucks coffee.  So how much carbon dioxide can people generate while waiting on their butts for their 800 calorie lattes?
Technorati tags: Starbucks, drive-through, wasting+fossil+fuel

As part of my quest to reduce my environmental footprint, I recently visited a nearby Costco, and was disappointed.  I’ve never been a member at the warehouse giant, but I’m trying to reduce the amount of packaging I purchase with my dry goods, and my theory was that if I buy in larger bulk sizes, […]

Happy New Year to everyone- I hope we’ve all resolved to make 2008 an even better year than 2007.  I watched the very interesting Edith Piaf biopic La Vie En Rose recently and have decided to approach environmental 2008 with her words from Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien:  I won’t worry about the good or bad […]

I just noticed in a previous post how similar the words politician and pollution are when my spelling abilities temporarily lapsed.  With that in mind, I wrote letters to my two Texas state senators this week for their political pollution in blocking the energy bill provision that would support renewable energy standards.  We could have this […]

Atlanta I feel your pain, though North Texas didn’t get the 100 day warning last year after our two year drought.  But seriously– praying for rain?  I’m all for the power of prayer; let’s all pray that people can change their practices, respect the planet and all of creation.  But praying for a stop-gap solution […]

An old classmate of mine sent me an email the other day, following his return from a business trip this past week to Beijing; I should note that this man is an engineering manager, and does not agree with man-made climate change or any of that tree-hugging stuff (the email was a bit of a surprise):
“Coming […]

I recently put together a list of my top 10 green lifestyle changes, and I left off one item, because it wasn’t a change, it was so ingrained in the way I was raised:  buy locally made items.  Over the years, I’ve adjusted this attitude somewhat because locally produced goods can be so hard to […]

Today I signed up to stop catalog delivery to my home through Catalog Choice, a service supporting sustainable industry best practices.  My biggest pet peeve is the Pottery Barn catalogs- a few years ago we bought a natural fiber rug from Pottery Barn for our living room.  Unfortunately, our dogs seemed to think the […]

We all need optimism to survive; we all need to feel like we matter, that we can make a difference, don’t we?  I’ve changed my life over the years to try to lessen my impact, to live a more environmentally aware lifestyle; the changes can be so small, but I feel better with each one. My […]

About five years ago, a real estate agent told me about a friend of his; this friend had recently declared bankruptcy and then, one week later, had been approved for a mortgage. The point, at the time, was that anyone could qualify for a mortgage. The many under-qualified buyers created exuberant demand for homes […]