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It’s Easy Being Green

In a post that got WAY off topic over at Music City Bloggers, #9 (the same nutcase I mentioned in this post) responds thusly to someone’s suggestion that we “get off the oil tit:”

Do you ride your bike to the grocery store? I guess you have a little cart behind your bike to haul the vegetables home. I’ll stick with my car.

While this post isn’t a direct response to #9 or anyone else, reading this comment reminds me of a rather disturbing trend I’ve seen lately. Namely, the idea that if you can’t or won’t make every aspect of your life 100% eco-friendly, then you might as well do nothing (or worse yet, if you do one thing eco-friendly, but not another, you are somehow a hypocrite!). Some of it’s politically motivated (”Al Gore isn’t dumpster-diving for his food, what a hypocrite!”). Some of it seems to be the result of some defense mechanism (”I don’t want to feel guilty for not doing my part so if I package it together as an all-or-nothing proposition, I can feel ok about not taking it on”). Some it is just the result of low self-esteem (”I’m so small, what can I possibly do that will make a difference”). Whatever the reason, I’m calling bull. A would-be environmentalist needs not do without the luxuries modern life gives us. Being “green” is about doing what you can to reduce waste or conserve resources, not about reducing your consumption or waste to zero.

Sure, it’s great if you can bike to work. If you’re close enough, it’s good for the environment and it’s good for your body. Most of us don’t have that option. My legs start to hurt at mere thought of biking to work and even more so once we move a good deal further away. That doesn’t mean there is nothing I can do. With simple steps such as keeping my tires aired up, staying within 5 mph of the speed limit, using cruise control on the highway, and (especially) taking it easy on the accelerator when the light turns green, I can increase my gas mileage by up to 30%¹. In addition to putting a bit of extra cash in my pocket, the potential is there for a massive positive impact on the environment. The average American drives 34 miles per day². The average car in America gets about 25 miles to the gallon³. That means that if every American driver (all 196 million of them⁴) took the simple steps above (without even changing the frequency in which they use their vehicle or the kind of vehicle they drive), America would save about 51,592,258 gallons of gasoline every day. In one year that’d mean the equivalent to over half the amount stored in the National Strategic Petroleum Reserve!!!

You don’t have to live completely self-sufficiently in a hut in the woods to help the environment. All you have to do is take small and simple steps to just improve from where you are, and whether you’re the type of person who makes your one car trip a week in a Prius and that’s only to pick up some food to supplement what you can get from your garden or the type of person who drives the kids to soccer practice in a Hummer while chowing down on McDonald’s, there is some small step you can do to decrease your negative impact on the planet, without having any kind of significant impact on your life. If we all took just one small step, what an impact we could have.

1. CNNMoney.com [↩]
2. CNN.com [↩]
3. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (PDF) [↩]
4. Wikipedia [↩]

VA Driving Fees

I don’t often talk about local issues, but the new “abusive driver fees” our state government has cooked up merit some discussion. For those who aren’t aware, the Virginia General Assembly has decided that it’s time “bad drivers” pay big for their offense. They have instituted civil “fees” that are applied separately from and on top of the fines and punishments already in place for driving infractions. These fees can total up to as much as just over $3000 for one offense and offenses range from the fairly benign, like speeding or not using your turn signal, to the more extreme such as DUI. Needless to say, the law is already being challenged in court, several petitions against it have appeared, and several lawmakers (who trumpeted their support of the bill initially) are now trying to distance themselves from it.

I have no problem with justice being served. I’m generally a law abiding citizen¹, but I speed from time to time. The thing is, if I get pulled for speeding, I acknowledge that I was breaking the law and wouldn’t have a problem paying the ticket. That all changes when the punishments no longer match the crime.

Let’s look at it this way: let’s say you steal a pack of gum. It was a bad idea to do, and I don’t think you’d find anybody who would tell you you’d done the right thing, but really the harm was minimal. But the shopkeeper saw you and came running out of the store after you. Most of you would probably acknowledge that you made a bad decision, pay for the gum, maybe a bit more for his trouble, then go on your way. But how might your response change if you knew that getting caught with the gum would leave you with a $1000 fine? A $5000 fine? Jail time? Death? Having already taken the gum in a moment of weakness, I suspect most of us, at some point, would decide to take our chances running rather that pay a horribly disproportionate cost for our indiscretion. Now take that runner and put them behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, and you see why amplifying penalties to absurd proportions can be a dangerous proposition. Justice is served by giving appropriate sanctions for crimes committed. Nothing is served by leveling massive fees for the smallest of offenses.

Of course, all of that assumes that the goal of the legislation is justice.  It isn’t, and the politicians aren’t even trying to hide that fact.  This is about one thing and that’s generating revenue for the state.   For one thing, these penalties are being billed as “fees” not “fines.”  The money from fines goes to education, but our legislators have other plans for the money they collect through these civil penalties, so to avoid having to spend the money they make from this lucrative scam on schools, they’ve decided that these are “fines” but “fees.”  If this is about serving justice and keeping us safe, why the need to direct the funds obtained through the legislation to anywhere other than where all the traffic fines go?

Another by product of the “fee” system is the fact that it’s simply not so easy to collect “fees” from non-Virginia residents as it is to collect “fines.”  To solve this they simply exempted no-Virginia residents from having to pay the fees in the first place.  Get that?  The politicians want to “keep us safe” from Virginia drivers, but when the guy in the car behind us is from Maryland (or elsewhere), we’re on our own.  How is selectively fining (I’m sorry, “feeing”) drivers from only within state keeping us safer again?  If the state has legitimate need of more funding, then simply raise taxes and try to convince the voters of the need before the next election.  Creating money-making legislation in the name of “keeping us safe” isn’t the way to go about it.

1. In fact the only traffic violation I’ve ever gotten was a parking ticket when my car broke down in 2 hour parking and the tow truck took more than two hours to get there [↩]

Feline Friday

“Here’s looking at you, kid.” -Hobbes¹²³⁴

=^..^=

1. Check out cats and other animals on the Friday Ark [↩]
2. And more cats at Weekend Cat Blogging [↩]
3. and Carnival of the Cats [↩]
4. and the Bad Kitty Chaos Festival [↩]

Cruel and Unusual?

When I first saw this story¹ about an inmate charged with indecent exposure for masturbating in his jail cell, no verdict had yet been handed down and I jokingly commented:

I think I’d define being confined to a jail cell WITHOUT even being able to touch yourself to be cruel and unusual punishment…

Now that a guilty verdict has been reached, I’m wondering if my statement might be more accurate than I’d originally guessed in posting it. Well, perhaps not technically “cruel and unusual,” but perhaps simply not the best thing to be regulating. Prisons may be government-funded and that might make them “public” per se, but I interpret indecent exposure laws as being more concerned with what goes on in the view of the public rather than simply on public-owned land. Prisoners (for good reason) don’t have private rooms they can wander off to. Certainly, they must expose themselves multiple times a day for activities such as showering and using restroom facilities. Many would argue that the drive for sexual release is as natural and common as the activities I mentioned above. In fact, every member of the selected jury acknowledge having masturbated at some point themselves. As a rule, prisoners have no other avenue for sexual release short of raping other inmates (and we don’t want to encourage that do we?). Unless he was wagging it out the window at passing traffic, I have a hard time finding fault (let alone criminal offense) with him just getting off by himself in his cell.

As for the Corrections Officer who filed the charge (as she has with seven other inmates), I’ve little sympathy. If it so terribly offends you to see humans being human, then perhaps a job watching humans day in and day out isn’t the best job for you.

1. Hat-tip: A Stitch in Haste : Voyeur Dire? [↩]

Feline Friday

Look out Gryphon!

Sigyn is about to pounce on you!!

=^..^=

Update: Both Gryphon and Sigyn (and Hobbes too) wonder why Carnival of the Cats isn’t accepting submissions this week?! Anybody know?

Update2: According to The Cat Blogosphere the problem with the Carnival of the Cats submission form is technical and you can still submit via email.