A lot of us have multiple environmental concerns. Many people have either gotten more efficient and cleaner cars, or have ditched personal cars altogether.  Others buy and install energy efficient bulbs, recycle as much of their trash as they can and so forth.

The Huffington Post is getting involved in supporting Colin Beavan and his No Impact Project.
Here’s a fragment of their post on the subject:

“With political and corporate forces getting in the way of large-scale change, the task is daunting. We think the first step is to get some perspective on the impact we’re already having.

Enter No Impact Man. We first heard about Colin Beavan and his No Impact Project around the time many others did – when the New York Times did a feature on him and his family’s efforts to live with no environmental impact in New York City for a year. Our reaction: intriguing, innovative and seemingly a bit kooky.

As we learned more about Colin, and saw No Impact Man, the documentary film and read his book of the same title, about his family’s year-long experiment, we were downright inspired. The documentary follows the Beavans’ journey as they incrementally lowered their impact through phases, such as making no trash, only eating food grown within 250 miles, using no carbon producing transportation (not even the subway!) and finally, no electricity in their home. By year’s end their impact was down to nearly zero.”

We plan to get involved and are hoping that some of you will give it a try as well.  Despite what the naysayers keep mumbling and screaming, the pollution problem is impacting us and our planet in a very real way.

We know that a little experiment such as this will not fix the actual problems, but it might provide an opportunity for a dry run and for the realization that we actually can reduce our personal footprint.

Technorati Tags: clean up, Colin Beavan, ecology, Environment, no impact week

Washington Post’s Tom Toles has been entertaining many of us for years with his great and insightful cartoons.

Here is his latest, from the September 27, 2009 issue of the newspaper. This time, it is a  a great commentary on the raging health-care reform issue. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Health care, reform, Tom Toles, Washington Post

The first major announcement at the Pittsburgh G20 summit concerned the reorganization of the group. On Friday, major world leaders announced themselves as a new board of directors for the global economy, promising to overhaul loose financial regulations and to work harder to control dangerous imbalances that contributed to the financial meltdown.

President Obama and the other leaders declared that in the future, the meetings of the Group of 20 nations would be the primary way of coordinating global economic policy. The G20 will take over the job that had been done for decades by G8.

That’s all fine and not exactly unexpected, even though many of the countries not included among the wealthiest and most influential eight, or twenty have long been pressing to expand the G8 format and even to expand the G20 to include more members.

That’s the economic/organizational side of the summit so far. The more surprising development occurred later on Friday when Presidents Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and Prime Minister Gordon Brown have together condemned the “discovery” of another Iranian nuclear enrichment facility.

The crux here is that Iran actually officially informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the existence of the underground facility on Monday and the U.S., French and British intelligence agencies have known about it for several years. It would be pretty hard therefore to call the facility exactly “secret” at this point.

Quite quickly Iran’s President has canceled a previously announced press conference in view of the “Big Three” statement on its nuclear program. It appears therefore that the move has succeeded in its probable goal of preempting any announcements on the subject by Iran.

In any case, both the “discovery” and the official condemnation by Obama, Brown and Sarkozy should make the upcoming meeting of Iran with six world powers quite interesting. We’ll be watching.

Technorati Tags: brown, Economy, G20, iran, nuclear, obama, Sarkozy, summit

At issue is toilet paper: the kind that is already fluffy and getting fluffier so fast that manufacturers are running out of synonyms for “soft”. Quilted Northern Ultra Plush is the first big brand with three plies and three adjectives in its name.

Environmental groups say that this race to make the fluffiest, softest butt paper is an environmental menace and another example of American excess.

As it happens, the butt-friendly U.S. toilet paper is mostly made by chopping down and grinding up old trees and the environmentalists would much prefer that the Americans, like Europeans wipe their asses with recycled paper.

Some progress has been made and a few U.S. manufacturers are now offering recycled versions of their butt-wiping products. The problem is that most Americans are so used to pampering their dirty sphincters, that softness is still “in” and recycled roughness hasn’t caught on very much as yet.

Toilet paper reportedly accounts for five percent of the U.S. forest-products industry, but that is still obviously too high a cost. Trading beautiful, old-growth forests for a pleasant sensation in America’s butt crack? Old trees cut down for the briefest and most undignified of ends and purposes?

No way, say the environmentalists, adding that cutting trees to feed the American obsession with softness removes too many trees – a valuable scrubber of carbon dioxide, contributing to global warming even more.

Why are the virgin wood paper fibers softer than the recycled kind? The answer is quite simple: fibers from virgin wood are longer, producing smoother paper and the recycled variety, which gets chopped up and reprocessed boasts shorter fibers, which tend to be rougher.

Toilet paper in about 75 percent of bathrooms in restaurants, offices and schools comes from recycled sources, mostly because it is cheaper.

But at home, most people like to pamper their asses and about 95 percent of Americans equip their bathrooms with the softest, most comfy variety of paper available, which almost invariably comes from virgin fibers, from trees cut for that specific purpose.

Big tissue makers say they’ve tried to make their products as green as possible, including buying more wood pulp from forest operations certified as sustainable.

But despite environmentalists’ concerns, they also say that customers are unwavering in their desire for the softest paper possible.

Greenpeace is on the job, pressuring paper manufacturers to do more to pamper the forests, rather than American’s butt cracks.

There’s also the issue of the paper’s strength. Few people enjoy finding that during the wiping operation their finger somehow found its way through one, two, or even three layers of paper.

This brings memories of an old, nasty joke that we have heard years ago about the then-Soviet toilet paper. It went something like this:

“How do you use the Soviet toilet paper? You unroll about half a foot, fold it once, find the folded edge and very gingerly and carefully rip a half circle in the middle of the folded part, about an inch across and put it aside, making sure that you don’t misplace it. It will soon come in very, very handy. Then you insert your finger in the resulting hole and carefully wipe your ass. And what do you do with the circle of paper that you have removed and placed aside? Its purpose should be very obvious by now. Carefully clean the underside of your fingernails.”

It isn’t our intention to insult our Russian friends, but for some quite justified reasons, many nasty anti-Russian jokes have evolved over the years in countries subjugated by the Soviet Union and this is just one of them.

Technorati Tags: American, asses, butts, Environment, global warming, paper, soft, toilet, trees

After being a member of Entrecard for quite some time, we have decided to finally bite the bullet and get out of this scheme.

We will be keeping the widget and the account until our currently purchased ads run their course and we will not be approving any new Entrecard ads.

Although the dropping process did enable us to read a whole bunch of interesting blogs and posts, too many of the Entrecard blogs were simply meaningless.

We are also totally uninterested in reading the postings of the numerous right-wing (or left-wing, for that matter) extremists, who probably couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag.

The “dropping” also was an incredible waste of time.

In any case, we hope that our friends will continue to visit Politicus and to post comments on our articles, as we plan to be as active as ever.

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Thank you all for your support!

Politicus

Technorati Tags: entrecard, More, no