I would sooner buy an electric Smart Car ( Glorified Golf Cart) then that nasty piece of bad design.

I love my Camaro Z-28 in all it’s 25mpg V8 355hp glory and embodiment of North Americs’s love affair with high performance automobiles.

I do ride mass transit for work and most errands, so I am usually under 50% of the National average of 30,000KM per year. So I am not a total enviro-jerk about my preference.

I returned with a floor lamp ( with CFLs as I better get used to them ) the bulbs were expensive here, the 2 bulbs cost more than the lamp!

Oh Well.

Plus some kitchen gadgets, so there was a price as you warned!

But remember, you never get something for nothing. I bet when you go to Ikea to recycle those bulbs you will come back with a packet of paper napkins, a small item of flat-packed furniture and a box of Swedish biscuits… That’s what usually happens to me.

I checked this out and I have this option, there are only 11 Ikea stores in all of Canada, but I have one 20 minutes from me. So I can get rid of my dead ones as they accept any brands, little out of my way but I will let everyone I know that this is available, thanks! I am thinking I will put a plastic box in my building (condos) recycling area so my trips are not wasted.

Ok, sorry had to say it was too good to pass up.

I think I could write a book, and may just do that, on the failures and challeges of these items.

None are completely terrible ideas except carbon-offsets. They jsut do not address the issue like people think it will.

Another thing is that when “greens” say everyone changing this one thing will save this much GHG emissions. It is so ridiculous, first everyone will not do this, second there is no way to handle it if everyone did.

If someone had sat down and thought the whole process through, like disposal of the CFLs, they would have created more jobs and ended up with a much greener product.

That is the kind of thinking that is required, not the make something regardless of the cost, impacts and potential side-effects, just to get something green on the market.

My Father told me some advice as a child that I tend to use today, except in the areas of spelling and grammer, doing something the right way takes longer, but not as long as trying to fix it after.

For the record I will agree with you on hybrids (mainly because they don’t represent the technical solution we are looking for), biofuels, and carbon off-sets (in some cases).

The others I think have serious potential, mostly.

The problem is the underlying precepts and overall goals, they are not clearly defined. That is the real problem in the mitigation issue. The outcomes of any action or no action at all are so amorphous that it is hard to rationalize the risk vs benefits of the issues. This means we are left with what you believe, or take on faith, from either side.

I really do not want to knock Mr Titus here, but there is nothing new here, but kudos to him as it is something that bears repeating until some dreamers and critics look at the issue objectively.

IMO there needs to be some frank and open discussion of what will be the real outcome of mitigation and if the goals are actually GCC mitigation or just adgenda driven shifts in the realm of economics to a vision of humanity’s future.

I have been accused of being overly critical by saying this will not work, that will not work, mainly because they won’t, but I have not heard anything that I can say, hey that makes sense!

Because there is no goal, no destination and no solutions when things like 20% reduction in GHG by 2012 is tossed out and left on the doorstep of Industry and the general population to actually deal with without any sort of plan to achieve the goal, or what the final goal really is. That makes the issue much worse and leads to decisions being made, products rushed to implementation all using poorly concieved ideas and most explicitly from not using Mr. Titus’s parameters.

Here are several examples of things that do not make any impact on the GHG problem without creating a whole new set of issues or actually increasing GHG emissions;

Bio-Fuels
Hybrid Vehicle
CFLs
Public Transit
Infrastructure Reconstruction
Green Collar Jobs
CO2 Sequestration
Plastic Bags
Wind/Solar Power
Alternative Energy
Carbon Off-Sets