What upsets me is that none of the "go green" hype is really solving the root of the problem. I'm a little dismayed at how advertising and broadcasting companies are spinning their products to look green instead of it actually being green. It's doing the same thing but calling it different, or at best causing only marginal changes. If anybody saw the John Stuart show yesterday, the "moment of zen" was when a magician turned Elmo green with the wave of a wand, as if painting yourself green is all it takes to improve our environment. Some examples:

1. 'clean coal' would be better described as 'just slightly less than dirty coal'.
2. new car commercials are conveying the message "our car is the green car of the future" even though it's the same crap. The new Honda slogan is "finally, it's here" implying that it's pollutant-free
3. someone who separates their trash to recycle, thinking that will make a difference.

On top of that, I saw some Earth Day report by a CNN correspondent about what you can do, and it was all a bunch of weak-sauce baloney just like the tech correspondent. One of his suggestions was "get a glass cup and wash it instead of using plastic cups."

Really. REALLY!??

The whole thing is making me upset, and causes me to ask "is there anything that we can really do?"

It's like Mr. Smith said in the Matrix. WE (the humans) are the virus destroying the world.
The only thing we can really do is to go away.

Now isn't that an egocentric view. As if we've done anything to threaten the existence of the world. We've merely threatened our own existence, along with most of the rest of life on Earth. The planet will still be here no matter what we do.

Every little bit helps. Recycling alone may not do much, but it may turn out to be that one tiny little snowflake that starts the avalanche of us not all dying.

EDIT:

Stop editing while I'm responding to you, dammit!

sorry. I'm a bit of a re-re-re-edit type personality.

I'm saying we're not talking about the mountain.

No, no it doesn't. It's like premature optimization; it doesn't help to reduce the time your rendering function takes by 1ms if you have a blocking call in your networking code. (this analogy assumes a single threaded approach, of course)

Uhm... yeah. You can do all the small things that are within your control. Oh wait? Do you think that each individual can solve the problem from the very top? Or do you think there's some person at the top that needs to do it for you?

As Dr. House would say, "People don't change." Hopefully, the "Going Green" trend will at least be a start in opening people's eyes to the changes we're going to have to make eventually, even if it isn't really changing anything now. Actually, Al Gore is the real start.

That depends entirely on the trash. Some things make a huge difference^[1], some not at all. It also depends on the waste infrastructure already in place. For example, everything that's even remotely combustible^[2] goes right in the trash for me, since I get it back in the form of remote heating (my city runs both a remote heating plant and a biogas plant entirely on garbage).

You also have to keep in mind that recycling is about saving on two^[3] different things: resources and energy. You have to look at the benefits of both to decide if it's worth it or not - nowadays, people have a tendency to be so CO₂ fixated that they forget all about resource usage.

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I've decided my life has immense meaning and that I am so important that I must act now to save the world from destruction!!!!

... or was that just the 007 film I watched?

I like to use EXTRA energy just to make somebody's hour worthless.

No, I'm kidding, but I wouldn't hold it against somebody that did. I think I'm relatively energy conservative as is. I don't make sacrifices, but I try to be careful not to waste resources. Most people don't so their hour doesn't compare to the countless resources they waste the rest of the year. I don't practice Earth Day.