OK, so how do you get 65 mpg at 0 mph? (Averaged over your trip, I assume, when you stopped for the pic?)

I don't put on mascara or take photographs while the car is moving! I waited until I stopped and took the photo.

The 65 mpg is the total mpg for my trip home.

Then you may be shocked to learn that I drive a 1989 F150 Ford pickup that gets 12.5 mpg on the highway, and yet consider it part of an energy-saving package. I use it to haul in firewood (the only fuel we use to heat our home) from our woodlots, up to a half-mile from the house. The mileage rate is even more atrocious there than on the road, and of course the chain saw uses some too. However, we still burn very little gas per heating season, and the wood itself is renewable and carbon-neutral.

A friend of mine in Topanga heats his water for showers with solar panels. I know that's not possible some places. I think our country started worrying about energy conservation way, way after it should have, and maybe we're behind where we could be because of that.

For the vast majority of the United States, solar power has a negative payoff.

And conservation is a fool's game. Sure, increasing efficiency is always worth looking at, and if it's economically feasible worth doing. But believing that we can somehow run the economy we have now on the level of energy we produced fifty years ago is irrational.

We need to invest (and should have been investing for the past thirty years) in high-density electrical generation and enhancing the grid. The idea that somehow we can all live off-grid just isn't gonna happen.

I mean, if you want to talk about massive energy consumption, let's talk about the internet. Server farms, colocation facilities, backbones, communication centers -- these all consume gigantic amounts of energy.

I wonder how many neo-luddites realize that the first casualty of cutting back energy use sufficiently to reduce CO2 emissions would be the internet?

The Internet, including server farms etc., is only responsible for around 1 or 2% energy usage.

Its a balancing act. I have a 1989 Dodge Ram truck that's paid for itself 10 times over. I catch flak from my neighbours, who drive their cars to the corner store, even though I bike almost everywhere and run the truck two or three times a month. Given the amount I use it I wonder if the costs associated with manufacturing and running a new car are worth it?

I barely drive, either (13,335 miles in almost four years), and a lot of last year's was going to Silverlake and back twice a week...probably 30 or 40 miles round trip.

Anyway, if you're really just driving two or three times a month, it doesn't seem worth it to buy some new vehicle. And how cool that you bike everywhere. I did when I lived in New York, but I'd be afraid to now, and am afraid to here, thanks to cell phones.

You know wut I hate most about popular environmentalist thinking?

(There are a lot of bad things to choose from, and picking a single one is difficult)

The idea that everyone thinks they have this karmic environmental back account out there, where they can use so much of such-and-such in terms of manufacturing, but then they have to give up this much biodragability or that much fuel efficiency.

People enjoy think of things that way because it's CHILDISH. It's fucking insane.

The whole "conserve energy" thing is a load of crap anyway. When the electric company was crying for all of us to conserve energy, we did - got "energy-efficient" appliances, changed to those funky spirally light bulbs, only ran my central air on sweltering hot days, only used the energy efficient washer, hung the clothes out to dry, and what happened? The freakin' rates went up (actually doubled!) anyway! Why? Because the CEOs and stock holders weren't making enough money! Damned if you do, damned if you don't. It's a miserable catch-22, and they know it. They're bleeding us dry and they don't give a shit because they've got their money.

Flynne - in addition to that, we're being penalized in CT for not generating our own power. That near doubling is almost all accounted for by those penalties.

I don't know who imposed them, or who's getting rich off of them, but we better build some power plants fucking pronto.

Here's a bit from C-Span on Congress' Energy Bill on You Tube. Pretty interesting, & definitely makes you think.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=e-LOtKIIKcg