What Do You Do for the Environment?

Al Gore finally made climate change "real" – god forbid, even trendy. So have you changed the way you live yet?

Published November 19, 2007 by The Huffington Post
By Abrahm Lustgarten

Al Gore finally made climate change "real" – god forbid, even trendy. So have you changed the way you live yet? And no, I don't mean buying guilt passes to add on to your airline tickets and offset your carbon footprint. I don't mean driving the oh-so-highly touted Chevrolet Tahoe or Cadillac Escalade, both of which were announced in hybrid models in Los Angeles last week. (Those vehicles now harness all the technology the 21st Century can offer to deliver around 20 miles per gallon – a fraction of what a Honda Civic got in the mid 1980s.) I'm talking about the kind of adjustments to your personal lifestyle and changes of long-engrained habit that Webster might define as "sacrifice"; The kind of changes that will actually make a difference. The kind of changes that acknowledge that the world is shared among a population that dwarfs that of the United States and Europe and has its own emerging needs, which will be hard to deny. It's past time.