Arriving in Paris after four days in Moscow, what was the most discernable difference between the two cities at first glance? The size of the vehicles people drive. In Paris bicycles, motorcycles and Smart Cars seem to be multiplying overnight. In Moscow, the same can be said of large, flashy sedans. True, at $8 a gallon, gas in Paris was double the price in Moscow. You would think crippling traffic would be incentive enough to downsize, but Russians don't seem to be feeling the pain. Maybe the explanation is as simple as the difference between a European society that's in a tight economic squeeze and a Russian society that's sowing its wild oats in the post-Communist era. Maybe it's the difference between a culture that believes in austerity in the name of the environment and one that won't worry itself about such things until every oil well is sucked dry. Or maybe it's both. Whatever the explanation, my husband Jeff observed there seems to be a simple inverse relationship between the size of people's apartments and the size of their vehicles in these two locales. According to his calculus, Muscovites have tiny apartments and big cars; Parisians have big apartments, tiny cars. I'll go with the Parisian model anytime. After all, what good is a big car if it's stuck in traffic all the time? Jeff's Unscientific List of Popular Cars:For more on traveling in Russia, click here
Well, I may not have been able to get anyone on Facebook to take me up on my offer of a ride to Washington to join protesters opposing the Keystone XL-Pipeline, but Bill McKibben and Co. managed to convince 12,000 people to show up at the White House last Sunday! What an amazing turnout to turn President Obama's head toward the importance of killing this project and sending the message that he's really the pro-environment, clean-energy guy we thought we had elected.Thanks to my husband Jeff and my daughter Sylvia, I had company as we helped to form a human chain encircling the White House three-times over to let Obama know that if he wants his supporters from 2008 to put in the effort to get him reelected, he has got to do his part. President Obama apparently was out playing golf on what was a gorgeous day, but I think there were enough cameras, tweeters, bloggers and reporters in attendance to deliver him the message. (See my slideshow below). Last week, the president made it clear in remarks to the press, that he is seriously weighing the potential environmental damage against jobs that could be gained by his approval of the pipeline. So, what started out last summer as a longer-than-long shot chance to turn back big oil, is looking a little more now like a winnable battle. But that doesn't mean we should put our slingshots away. Goliath may be on his knees, but he's still out there. The day I was slated to picket the White House and risk arrest to block the Keystone XL Pipeline was instead the day I attended the funeral of an amazing woman, Elizabeth Bata, a Holocaust survivor who for 93 years stood tall for what she believed in. So after hunkering down for Hurricane Irene and then hosting my son Ben on his 21st birthday (down from his temporary gig in New Hampshire), I made my way to Washington to lend my voice to the outcry (see this post for the details on the issue). A few thousand protestors were in attendance in Lafayette Park on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend to support the people who were getting arrested for trespassing on the sidewalk bordering the White House. By and large, these were people who had, like me, gone door-to-door to get Obama elected in 2008. But after the president announced last Friday that he would abandon his recent efforts to toughen air-quality standards, these people were frustrated and angry. If Obama disappoints them yet again by approving this pipeline, they'll be sitting in droves --- not under Obama's nose on the sidewalk, but on the sidelines of his re-election campaign. Do I hear a movement afoot to draft Al Gore? (Renewable) Power to the People?And what if the pipeline took a turn and ran through the White House grounds, like this...?In a few weeks from now you'll find me sitting down at the gates of the White House, with a few hundred like-minded people, waiting to get arrested. Why? Because I believe NASA's James Hansen and a whole cadre of eminent climate scientists when they tell me that if President Obama green lights a new pipeline from the Tar Sands of Alberta, Canada to oil refineries in Texas, he will be guaranteeing our children a future on a dangerously overheated planet. President Obama has the unilateral authority to decide, as early as September, whether to "light a fuse to the largest carbon bomb in North America," to quote the folks at tarsandsaction.org. And we need to raise our collective voices and insist that our president honor his campaign pledge to transition us to a clean-energy economy and put the brakes on the kind of environmentally destructive and energy intensive practices being used to mine Canada's vast pristine forests and bogs for this dirtiest form of petroleum fuel. The development of the 1,700-mile-long Keystone XL Pipeline would invite the full exploitation of the Alberta Tar Sands, the world's largest oil reserve outside of Saudi Arabia and the our country's single greatest source of oil. From August 20th to September 3rd, thousands of Americans from all over the country will take turns joining in peaceful protest with dedicated environmental activists like Bill McKibben, Danny Glover and David Suzuki. They will risk arrest by getting within shouting distance of the White House to demand that the tar sands be left in the ground in order to give the planet a fighting chance to get back to a stable climate. So I'm giving three days of my time to the movement-- not much, given the high stakes. If anyone wants to join me, I'm going down on August 21st. But there are three weeks in which to act. So choose a time that's convenient for you. This issue needs your voice. Click here to sign up: http://www.tarsandsaction.org/sign-up/ I can't say what's going on in people's homes, but from what I can tell from the hotels we frequented, conserving energy and reducing carbon emissions is on the minds of people in tourism and commerce in India. Every hotel we visited encouraged the reuse of towels, had exclusively florescent bulbs, power outlets with on/off switches that prevented energy loss from “phantom loads,” and master key switches at the entry doors that cut off all power on exiting the room. And even some of the smaller accommodations like the Brunton Boatyard in Fort Kochi and the Wilderness Camp in the Thar Desert sported spanking new solar panels and solar hot water heaters. We even saw small solar arrays on the houseboats in Kerala! While these energy saving improvements seem minimal, it’s more than I’ve seen in many of the American hotels we’ve visited in recent years. Aside from the hotel efforts, there was evidence that solar-powered rickshaws are coming soon to the traffic-choked streets. Ironically, we got a glimpse of what the rickshaws might look like in the workshop at the vintage car museum. While there were plenty of trucks hauling goods, there were also bicycles and pedal rickshaws piled high with deliveries. Ride sharing is a way of life. Several of the stores and stands we visited packed our purchased items into shopping bags made out of recent newspapers rather than plastic. What struck me most, though, was what I saw – or didn’t see – every time we took off in an airplane for another city. Even over the biggest metropolises of Delhi and Mumbai, the number of glimmering lights was a tiny fraction of what I’ve seen over even small and medium-sized cities in the West. With India growing at its current staggering rate, an increase in the number of lights is, of course, inevitable. We can only hope that the lion’s share of them will someday soon be powered by renewable energy sources. Here in Northern India, garbage is a constant blight. For 120 miles from Delhi to Agra, a river of discarded snack wrappers, plastic bags and paper runs almost uninterrupted along the roadside, punctuated frequently by large mounds where stray dogs and sacred cows scavenge. Somehow, I've never once seen anyone throw refuse from a car or even from the endless array of food stands that are everywhere. But there it is, in inorganic heaps and I can't imagine how such a problem could ever be brought under control. Still, frequently I see billboards or signs on buses boasting of a green and clean New Delhi. That must be some parallel universe I haven't seen yet. In the meantime, maybe my daughter Sylvia and her colleagues at the environmental studies department at Brown can devise some way for people in places like this to turn the garbage into harmless building materials or fuel that magically doesn't pollute or something!!
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