People who live in places like San Diego forget this. You hear/read stuff like this all the time:
I got rid of my car three years ago, and I now ride my bike every day to work (jpeg of beat-up 30 year old Schwinn, complete with saddlebags, head/tail lights, and bell, used for commute). My spouse/roommate/partner, who has a longer commute, rides a Vespa, which was converted to biofuel (website of gas/biofuel conversion facility)....
Well, I don't live in southern California, nor do I live in any other bike-friendly location like New York City. I live in Clinton, New York, which Mapquest will tell you lies near the Mohawk Valley in central New York. It's about as far Upstate as I care to live. We measure snow in feet, not inches. One foot of snow will probably not result in school closings. Two feet of snow will probably not be accepted as an excuse for being late to work. When it's not snowing, you will find the terrain of my part of Upstate New York quite inhospitable for bicyclists. I usually portage mine on the back of my hatchback to the Erie Canalway Trail for recreational rides. Then I combine that with a shopping trip, but more about that later.
Public transportation in my region is practically non-existent. Sure, there are buses, but they don't really go anywhere unless you are a frequent visitor of one of the local hospitals, nursing homes, or retirement communities. When I see a bus, it is usually empty. I wondered about this before I saw the local bus schedule. When I see a bus stop, it consists of only the small blue sign marking it. The usual placard underneath telling people where the bus goes and when the next one can be expected to show up is conspicuously absent. As I said, public transportation here is "practically nonexistent" because it's not really practical for most people to take the bus, which costs the county millions a year to run empty, where I live.
So I drive a very small car - a Scion xA, to be exact. It consistently gets around 35 miles per gallon driving around on pothole-ridden country roads, and is only on the road when it is reasonably necessary. Oddly enough, that includes bicycle trips. The Canalway Trail is more or less perfectly flat. The roads around my house, that is, the ones I feel safe being on with my bike, are not. Since I'm old and busted, and overweight and out of shape on top of it, I am no longer up to scaling Mount Everest on my bike. So it's the Canalway Trail for me, and then a trip to the store to make more effective use of the gas it took to bring me and my bike there. I try to be green, but it's not as easy as some people think it is.
There are many ways in which green alternatives that some people think everybody must either implement or the Earth will die are simply not practical or not available to people like me. Solar power is one of them. Central New York gets the least amount of sunshine of anywhere in the continental United States. The sunshine we do get is of such poor quality that putting solar panels on my house would be a waste of the resources it took to make the solar panels. Wind is something we have in abundance, but unless you live on a farm (we don't), you don't have room, let alone the money, for a windmill big enough to take you off the grid. We do have a pellet stove, though. It's pretty big, but it won't heat the whole house past about 55 degrees in January, so we haven't retired the oil-fired boiler. We did, however, reduce our oil usage from 550 gallons a season to something like 200 gallons. Since wood pellets are considered carbon-neutral, I like to think we're doing our part to save the planet. And our pocketbooks.
As for the house, no way would we have something like built ourselves, but since it was already there, we have lived in a log home (built in 1989) on an acre of land for the past ten years. Yes, our footprint is pretty big, but not as big as a lot of people's, and we have planted trees on our acre each and every year we have lived there, at least 900 square feet of our back yard is devoted to victory gardens, with pear and plum trees, currant, blueberries, and wild raspberries planted on the rest. Sometimes the birds bring us something good, like berry seeds wrapped in fertilizer, and crap it out on the side of the fence. I made sure to be careful with the lawn mower once I found out what those thorny bushes were. This year, I want to explore something I heard about called the Three Sisters, where you plant corn, beans, and squash on the same garden plot, which complement each other and conserve soil. I'll let you know in September how that works out. So yes, we have a not-very-green house and a big yard, but we didn't build it, and we did a lot to make it greener. It's an ongoing process.
The nice thing about having a decent sized house is that you have plenty of space for your recycling activities. Recycling is highly encouraged in New York State; those who refuse to do it pay more for trash removal than those who do it religiously. Since we fall into the latter category, we usually have two bags of recycle for every bag of trash. We also have a bottle bill that is about to include things like bottled water(which we refuse to buy - the water in our well is the best in the world). You either pay a nickel per container or you bring the empties back to the store. It's a good thing.
So what is the moral of this rant? Well, I guess it would be that being green means different things to different people who live in different parts of the country. We all can't live in San Diego. In fact, some of us still live in the Lake Effect Zone where the snow is measured in feet. You won't be able to cut your energy use or carbon footprint to that of a Stone-Age hunter-gatherer if you fall into the latter category, but if you work at it, you can do pretty good.