Here are my 10 green ideas to improve the environment. Feel free to add better ones below.
----- 1.
Solar panels on the White House. As solar panels have gotten cheaper with recent breakthroughs, they hold promise as a source of light ambient power. The roof of the White House is, I am sure, pretty and historic, but a clearer statement by the President (not this one, a real one someday) about alternative energy is hard to imagine. Solar panels can be fitted into light bedsheet-like brackets or fabric and draped across the roof and connected in series or parallel, so that no one has to be nailing them into the shingles of the White House, if that's what it takes to keep the Daughters of the American Revolution happy. Schoolkids on the White House could stop and look at the "White House power meter" running backwards due to the solar panels. A small thing but one guaranteed to keep people talking about solar power, at least nightly on Jay Leno. -----
caught as already been done by an observant reader below, to whom thank you for catching it!!
2. McNugget 500. Get McDonalds to sponsor a NASCAR style race of cars run off of kitchen grease or french fry oil, as some engines have been converted to do. Granted the speeds will not reach those of NASCAR, but when people are paying $3.00 a gallon, it might get some creative minds thinking. Moonshine 500 might be better for cars that burn alcohol.
3. Transit actions. This is less fun but needed. Every metro area in the country above 500,000 gets rail, period, painted red white and blue to reflect the patriotic nature of easing the nation's carbon footprint, with the length to depend on metro area size. Tie highway money to transit - if you don't build the rail, you don't get the road money. Require all new highway construction to adopt a rail-transit friendly median and to include highway-based bus transit stops on or immediately above the highway itself (instead of busses leaving the highway, they go up a slight ramp, pick up and drop off fares, then back down, like a truck weighing station only in the median or above to keep speed high, with elevators to underpassing roads and parking lots.)
4 Carbon footprint labelling on consumer goods. How much carbon emissions were by-produced in the production of your lingerie? Your Jimmy Choos? Your stereo? The plastic cup at Starbucks? I don't know whether a law is needed or not. How much carbon emissions emit from the consumption of one U.S. gallon of gas.
5. Shabbat. This is not a public policy idea but a human one. I don't mean to push religion or to trivialize religion either. But observant Jews celebrate a weekly holiday during which the cell phones, cars, electric lights, the Internet, etc. are not active. There may be wisdom in a shutdown and recharging not of our cell phone batteries, but of our own batteries, while giving the environment a literal breather.
6. Gas station owners - an unexpected potential ally. Many gas station owners may be potential allies with the alternative fuels movement. Why? Because unlike gasoline, many alternative fuels of the near future do not involve tank liability. What is tank liability? The underground tanks that hold gasoline in filling stations are enviro-disasters and are a MAJOR sticking point in negotiations when owners sell their station - who agrees to "eat" the tank liability? Converting to electric charge-ups that take longer may enable station owners to build a new business on site - sit down meals. Hell, shopping malls may have entire parking sections dedicated to cars that want to get charged up, but without the nightmare of gasoline management and tank liability.
7. Junk mail logs. Will someone find a profitable way to turn junk mail into burnable logs? If you could take your junk mail to a shredder and get 10 cents for a pound for it, would you? The goal would be both to recover waste while providing a meaningful threat to the paper-consuming junk mail industry itself. (Like you need another mortgage refinance offer or credit card offer.)
8. DVD/CD exchange club. You drop by your local Starbucks or other daily or weekly source of addictive vice, and take 3 DVDs with you. You then get to pick two others to take home. Eventually the pile grows. If it grows too large, make it even trading. Goal: secondary market for plastic trash. Plus the really bad discs can be made into decorative items, placed under a glass tabletop, etc. (Yes, in Baltimore we do do tacky.)
9. Internet Trip Combiner. Someone, maybe Google, can get this done. You plug in your tasks - where you live, what you have to get done - and the Combiner tells you where, how and in what order to get the tasks done and the stuff bought, if applicable, with the least mileage footprint from local merchants. E.g. I need drycleaning, a haircut, an oil change and non-fancy grocery shopping - go to Lee's, Joe's, Kroger's THEN Jiffy Lube, then home. This is green for pro-environment and saving dear hard-earned green money. Good for college students, visitors, temp workers, vacationers, harried parents and all of us whether environmentally focused or not. If this already exists, please link below with my thanks.
10. Telecommute City. People with long commutes but who work online or on a network should be able to ditch that commute part of the time. Yet many workers like the camadarie of work, someone else providing the coffee, etc. Hence the idea of telecommute City. For a small fee (paid by the employer, presumably), suburban towns could have centers where people punch in, have IT support, etc., for the work that they do. Not everyone who uses a computer owns one at home or wants to. Employers who don't like the idea of "work from home" might buy into part-time co-locating in a satellite office, if their work is not extremely confidential or classified. It could also be a good tool for emergency space concerns, or if a problem employee needed to be isolated or wanted to be isolated. Employers could spent less on coffee, vacuuming, stolen supplies and maybe both satisfaction and productivity would increase by this option. The federal government already does this in a few places, but the private sector outsourcing of ... the office itself?...is on the way. Saves the employee gas money and commute emissions, depending on the locations involved.
Thanks for considering the foregoing - please add your green ideas below if you like.