Want to Kick Our Oil Addiction? Let's Get Our Priorities Straight First
You'd have to be living in a cave since the beginning of the BP oil spill to not have heard, or made, statements about never letting this sort of environmental disaster happen again and kicking our...
View ArticleMinus Oil: Forget Hybrids And Solar Panels, We Need Active, Exciting and...
Matt has noted that almost three quarters of our oil goes for transportation, and concludes that we have to create "more communities where the average person's daily needs are met on
View ArticlePrioritizing Plastics Key to Kicking Oil Addiction - Plus Reducing Waste &...
Once we've gotten our priorities straight regarding reducing the massive amount of oil we use in transportation--largely because we've built our communities into places where most people need to drive...
View ArticleMoving Beyond Oil: Restoring Meaning to the Word "Necessity"
What things can you absolutely not live without? Pause for a second and really think about that. You can't live without it. What did you come up with? This question when applied to our lives and, more...
View ArticleSetting a Price on Carbon Will Help US End Oil Addiction - Not Just Combat...
There's lots of overlap between ending our oil addiction in the United States and combatting climate change, with setting a price on carbon (regardless of the mechanism used, be it cap and trade, a...
View ArticleMy Other Car Is A Bright Green City: A Second Look
Working on a post for our Minus Oil series, looking at the relationship of oil, cars and urban design, I keep circling around a post Alex Steffen of Worldchanging wrote two and a half years ago: My
View ArticleDo We Really All Have To Live Like New Yorkers? Does Density Matter?
Reading David Owen's The Green Metropolis, one would conclude that density is everything, that New York is, as he wrote in the New Yorker, "The Greenest City in America":
View ArticleHow Can We Reduce Oil Consumption & Still Ship Goods and Ourselves Around the...
Two things which I think are worth keeping front and center when discussing how we wean ourselves off our petroleum addiction: Travel between nations is good; trade between nations is
View ArticleWould Simply Slowing Down Our Travel & Shipping Help Kick Our Oil Habit?
Having assessed the overall picture of how our patterns of global shipping and global aviation use tons of fuel, leave a high environmental footprint, and how technological changes can help
View ArticleMinus Oil: Energized Ideas for Surpassing Petroleum
With the BP oil spill fresh in everyone's minds, and the call for solutions to end the collective petroleum addiction rising louder than ever, it's tempting to just say let's just stop using oil. But...
View ArticleHow Can We Detox Our Cars From Their Oil Addiction? (Part 1)
Photo: Flickr, CCFrom Here to ThereThe catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was only the latest in a long list of reasons why we should transition away from oil as rapidly as we can. It's a...
View ArticleStop Eating Fossil Fuels, Start Eating Food
Michael Pollan says that if you eat a typical American diet, you are made of corn. Dale Allen Pfeiffer takes it one step further, and says We are Eating Fossil Fuels. (Actually, Jaymi points out that...
View ArticleHow Can Technology Reduce Global Shipping's Fuel Consumption?
If we're going to start this great transition off of oil we really need to start thinking hard about how we're going to move ourselves and our goods around the globe. Part of that is thinking
View ArticleMinus Oil:Three Ways Technology Can Curb Our Consumption
Our culture is obsessed with technology, and for many people it seems the solution to our environmental conundrums is embedded in the ways we utilize the technology we have to create solutions. To a...
View ArticleIf You Really Want To Get Off Oil, Move To Buffalo
A few years ago, Wired Magazine published an interesting map showing carbon footprint per capita that graphically demonstrated the obvious: Where you get sprawl, lots of cars and air conditioning, you...
View ArticleIs the Electrification of Transportation a Good Thing? (Part 2)
Electric Cars are Coming - Is it a Good Thing?In part 1, we looked at why it's important to get our cars off oil and what the first part of that transition might look like. Today, we look at the next...
View ArticleHow Should We Really Measure Green Building?
Katherine Salant writes in the Washington Post:Can a big house be green? Yes, but a smaller house will always be greener because fewer resources were used in its construction and less energy is needed...
View Article11 Steps For Starving Students That Will Make A Difference For The Environment
When asked a few years ago what the single most important thing one could do to reduce their carbon footprint, a so-called expert (not on this site) responded "get rid of vampire power." Since then we...
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