I just got back from a family vacation. I went with David Brown and our families rented a house on the beach in San Diego. We visited Legoland, Sea World, the Zoo, etc. San Diego is a great kid-friendly town.
Randomly, I brought along An Inconvenient Truth with me to watch. David and Kris (Brown) had seen it and told me that it motivated them to buy their Prius hybrid. Gore presents some pretty compelling stats, and it certainly gets you thinking that something fundamentally new is going on. To me the most salient point is that we’ve gone from 2 billion to 6 billion people on the planet really, really quickly. This will obviously cause more stress on the planet, no matter what your views on global warming are. I thought the movie did a good job of explaining the issue, but left something to be desired in terms of how to go and do something about it. The web site has a “take action” area that picks up where the movie left off.
While I was gone and avoiding email, my friend Ari Newman invited me to join GreenDimes. This is a cool web site that makes stopping your junk mail easy. It costs about a dime a week, and they also plant a tree each month for you. Sure, you can sign up to stop your junk mail for a buck, but I wanted to get the trees too and support this site, so I signed up. If you’d like to sign up, please accept my invitation.
Anyway, I guess I’ve gone a little greener in this last week. Maybe for my next vacation, I won’t rent a SUV. 
Popularity: 6% [?]
May 6th, 2007 at 8:11 am
It is wonderful that you are supporting the reduction of greenhouse gases and thinking about how your household can help reduce waste. We all need to think more about what we can do to help support our kids futures.
But we are confused a little and disappointed that you have overlooked an identical company that promotes saving the environment by opting out of postal junk mail in your own home state and own home town, Boulder. We have been helping people locally and nationally stop junk mail since 2001.
We continually read about how you want to attract businesses to Colorado and how you want to promote locally bred companies (www.coloradostartups.com) and here you are promoting a Silicon Valley startup. We are mostly disappointed because we applied for your Tech Stars program back in March 2007 but our idea was rejected. In this program you advertised for 10 companies who needed help getting their idea off the ground.
We have also been nominated as one of Boulder County’s fasted growing Small Businesses and will be represented at the Mercury 100 celebrations on May 9th at the Boulder Theater.
May 6th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Hi Margot,
Congrats on the Mercury 100. Would love to cover what you’re doing on ColoradoStartups.com if you’d be up for it. Please let me know (I replied to your email earlier as well). I didn’t “choose” GreenDimes over a Colorado company - somebody referred me to them, I saw value to me, so I signed up. I do recall the StopTheJunkMail application but didn’t specifically recall that the application was from a Colorado company. Anyway, would love to cover StopTheJunkMail.com - give me a shout.
May 6th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
I find it ironical that so many outspoken environmentalists drive Priuses…but if you do some research, you’ll find out that they are actually bad for the environment. The world would be a far greener place if people spent a little more time learning about economics than proselytizing about their (malformed) convictions.
Shield on; bring on the proselytizers.
May 6th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
@Tom - I did some quick research. Interesting debate. I think the part about the fact that it costs more to build is BS, personally. I think the point is that consumer demand will drive down production “costs” (environmental and otherwise). Without initial demand, this stuff will never scale and get more efficient. I think many of the people who are buying hybrids are doing it to move the market, realizing that it’s more “expensive” in reality.