12.18.2005

If you have more than one bumper sticker on your car do you lose credibility?

For the second time this week I got behind the same car that touted the driver's personal (extremist) political views on the bumper. The bumper stickers were all about bicyclists/bicycling. The extreme ones said "It doesn't take a war to power my bicycle". Another one had a picture of the bike with the saying, "Zero $ Per Gallon".

The funny thing to me was that his statements were on his car that I am assuming is powered by the war I mean gasoline. He could have been running on bio-diesel but I didn't smell French fries.

I do want to live a life that is conscience of consumption and take steps to conserve where I can. One way that I am conserving oil is by using natural laundry detergent. Seventh Generation brand detergent says this on the label:

"If every household in the U.S. replaced just one bottle of 100 oz. ultra petroleum based liquid laundry detergent with our 100 oz. vegetable based product, we could save 200,000 barrels of oil, enough to heat and cool 11,400 U.S. homes for a year!"

Another thing I read recently was that if cities and towns would use flashing yellow and red lights at intersections during the overnight hours, it would save a lot of wasted idling at red lights when there is no traffic coming in the opposite direction. Some of the intersections in Greensboro use this technique and I believe there is a push in the local government to use it more.

1 comment:

Kevin Cieslukowski said...

the chew couldn't post a reply for some reason so i am for him. here it is...

I don't think it's extremism to oppose the war! Do you?
On the bicylce front, I think it's still fair for people to have pro-biking stickers on their petroleum powered vehicles. A lot of our lifestyles are, unfortunately, beyond our control. We can push politically and socially for what we'd like to see (communities that are smaller and more pedestrian/bike-centric), but reality may force us to live in Woodbridge and commute 1.5 hours each way to work.