COOL!!!! A KIDS DRAWING!!!

I wish that every kid would draw that exect picture and show it to Mom & Dad.

HEHEHE!

Being serious ;)

I'll be sending this page to everyone I know. Maybe they will get it, hopefully.

Good job! :D

I don't see how cars can be "good travel" and airplanes "bad travel". These are approximately equivalent in terms of fuel use, especially if the car has one passenger, a typical business traveler.

Cars are replaced far more frequently than airplanes, and require far more CO2 intensive infrastructure (roads). I'd like to see a true full-system life cycle comparison between these modes:

1. Hybrid car (Prius)
2. Standard efficient car (Civic class)
3. Large car or minivan.

vs.

1. Recent generation small airliner (Boeing 737-800 with winglets)
2. Turboprop (50 to 70 passengers)
3. Personal diesel-powered aircraft (Diamond D, four places).

These are all fairly standard and available choices. I'm excluding as obviously bad both private jets and vehicles such as the Hummer. I'm also excluding currently unavailable but on-the-horizon technology such as the carbon-composite Boeing 787 or the Tesla Roadster.

To this should be added infrastructure requirements, meaning highway, bridge, tunnel, and gas station construction in the case of cars, and airports in the case of airplanes.

Vehicle construction CO2 footprint should also be added. Bear in mind that a typical airplane of any size is typically flown some 30 years. Since jetliners fly millions of miles, their construction CO2 footprint per passenger-mile is nearly zero. You can't say the same thing for cars.

I've run these numbers in a rough way and concluded that for long trips single passenger car use is nearly always worse than airplane travel. Right off the bat airplanes have the advantage of traveling in a straight line, while a typical land route is 30% longer. If the land route goes over hilly terrain, even an efficient car with two passengers will fare worse than an airplane. Airliners do badly over short routes (

Doing this right is a lot of work, but it is irresponsible to recommend behavior based on superficial comparisons. Sometimes airplanes are better, sometimes they are worse.

Regardless, "Good" travel cannot include cars, at least not till full electrics are a realistic alternative.

Great picture. Great advice.

I have every one of the check marks hit, save one. The 'energy audit'. I am in green Seattle, and I would think it would be easy to find a consultant to do an energy audit, but I can not locate one.

Any suggestions?

TIA!

Evidently, our children see quite clearly what their elders are adamantly denying: the time for change is now.

Please consider a few open questions related to the ominous potential for mass devastation that could result from human-induced climate change between now and 2025.

Is it somehow harmful to ask direct questions like this one regarding good scientific evidence of the potential for either apocalyptic climate change or pernicious impacts from the rapidly growing, colossal presence of the human species on Earth?

Are willful blindness, hysterical deafness or elective mutism ever acceptable "defenses" for scientists who choose to deny evidence derived from good science?

Is there some reasonable, sensible or moral foundation upon which faithful scientists can stand upright and say, "I refuse to acknowledge carefully and skillfully gained scientfic evidence if I cannot refute it?"

Are scientists who present good evidence of climate change and human population dynamics, even though their research is plainly unforeseen and surely unwelcome, entitled to have their evidence openly discussed by professional colleagues with established expertise?

If the global challenges looming before humanity are as formidable as the best available scientific evidence indicates, then is the family of humanity not well-advised to begin widely sharing in open discussions in the mass media, not just in blogs like this one, what is to be done in order to avoid whatsoever is unmanageable, while managing and mitigating everything else?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001

I sent this to my 11-year-old daughter. Been trying to get her on the bandwagon. She's a good hippy child, though - she'll catch the fever eventually. :)

You're barking up the wrong tree promoting this as effecting "climate change". It's going to backfire when the theory does not pan out.

Promote it as resource conservation and anti pollution measures.

By the way I do a lot of the stuff on this graphic, but I do not believe AGW.

Glidedon, there are exactly two possibilities.

1) AGW is real and will accelerate

2) AGW is a figment of hyperactive imaginations

Let us avoid debate on the finer points of the greenhouse effect and so on. We can save time by assigning each of these two possibilities a probability of 50%. A coin flip. The very definition of uncertainty.

If we do nothing (Meaning we do quite a lot, actually, since taking the Earth to 500 ppm of CO2 by 2050 and 1,000 ppm by 2100 is hardly "doing nothing", but I digress.), and you are right, then nothing catastrophic happens; just a lot of old-fashioned pollution and its well-known consequences. If you are wrong, however, the climate will change, sea levels will rise, fresh water will become scarce for billions of people, there will be conflict, extinctions, economic damage, and so forth.

On the other hand, if we move to a zero-CO2 emissions world, we can be sure AGW will not happen, and the air will be cleaner in a conventional sense. Oil companies will go out of business, and energy will be costlier for a few decades, till renewable technologies mature.

Doing nothing is a gamble. Getting rid of CO2 emissions is not. Gamble in Las Vegas if you like, but not with the one planet we all share.

Not exactly true... there is an enormous cost to the social conditioning and command economy measures called for by the true AGW believers.

Look, I used to be persuaded by efforts to be "green" and care about conservation. But now that conservation = sell our national freedom and productivity for AGW counter-measures, I am disgusted by all this stuff.

The sophistry, the propaganda, social manipulations foisted upon us, and the stigmas laid upon the AGW non-believers, are just insane.

Why must science ignore that historically carbon levels follow temperature, not precede it... the medevil warm period... the activity of sunspots... the broken weather modeling... and the tremendous INCREASE in polar bear populations for goodness sake!!!

Lets pursue alternatives, and use our innovation to make them viable both economically and environmentally!

Please stop the madness, and I promise I'll start recycling my newspapers and cardboard.

Can we make a deal?