In his State of the Union speech, Bush said he wanted us all to cut our gas consumption by 20% by the year 2010.\u00a0 He proposed more fuel efficient cars and more ethanol as the means to get there.<\/p>\n
I don’t understand why conservation wasn’t part of it.\u00a0 If only 1 in every 5 people who commute to work carpooled, then that right there is a big part of the 20%.\u00a0 When I drive to work, and I am waiting for a turn to drop off one of the guys in my carpool, maybe 20 to 30 cars drive past me on their way to work.\u00a0 I’d be damn surprised if one<\/b> of those cars has more than one person in them, and most are huge SUV type things.\u00a0 I understand that in many places, people are coming from many different outlying suburbs to get to work.\u00a0 But here, at least, most of these people are neighbors, coming from very close by developments.\u00a0 It would add at most 10 minutes for them to pick up someone.<\/p>\n
Or, people could plan their week better and make one less trip to the grocery store.\u00a0 I mean, it wouldn’t be that hard to conserve gas.\u00a0 It might not add up to 20%, but it would get us damn close.<\/p>\n
Ethanol has a lot of problems.\u00a0 It is not very environmentally friendly.\u00a0 Beyond the green house gases that burning it causes, the mere fact that it requires fertilization means that the nitrogen cycle gets impacted to a very large degree.\u00a0 That has a lot of consequences for the environment.<\/p>\n
The only real long term solution to solve these problems (environmental concerns and dependence on foreign fuel supplies), it seems to me, is to start just using less of the damn stuff.\u00a0 Stop putting so much pollutant in the air.\u00a0 And one real way to start doing that is to conserve.\u00a0 To carpool.\u00a0 To plan our days better.\u00a0 That will help a hell of a lot more than ethanol.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In his State of the Union speech, Bush said he wanted us all to cut our gas consumption by 20% by the year 2010.\u00a0 He proposed more fuel efficient cars and more ethanol as the means to get there. I don’t understand why conservation wasn’t part of it.\u00a0 If only 1 in every 5 people … Continue reading Why not conservation?<\/span>