The Mayans and Egyptians constructed incredible feats of architecture able to weather the test of time, but they had no idea their pyramids would inspire the shape of the latest carbon-neutral super-structure to hit Dubai. Dubai-based environmental design firm Timelinks recently released some eye-catching renderings of the gigantic eco pyramid - aptly named Ziggurat - with plans for its official unveiling scheduled for the Cityscape Dubai event which runs October 6-9 of this year. The ginormous pyramid will cover 2.3 square kilometers and will be able to sustain a "community" of up to 1 million.

I hate to be a downer, but the amount of power solar cells provide is a couple orders of magnitude off from what you need to power a vehicle. Think charging your iPod, not your Prius.

A bit of envelope math...

So a good days' charge will provide you with a little less than 8 minutes' worth of freeway travel. Much less if you're not using cruise control @ the speed limit.

I haven't checked into it, but I think a car needs more than 10 horsepower to maintain a highway speed.

About a year ago, while at a supermarket -- can't remember which -- I read a thought-provoking sign that was posted at the check-out counter. In essence, it said the store was using only plastic bags.

On the surface, that seemed to be very environmentally unfriendly. But the sign went on to explain a rationale that hadn't occurred to me until then, asserting that the energy and exhaust fumes expelled to transport the same number of paper bags outweighed the fact that plastic wasn't biodegradable. Paper bags take up more space and require more trucks for transport, so the store believed it was lessening its carbon footprint by using plastic.

It got me thinking, so I looked into it a bit further. According to the Society of Plastics Industry, it requires 400 percent more energy to manufacture a paper bag than a plastic one. And while paper bags are compostable and biodegradable, they also cost the world trees, potentially increasing greenhouse gasses. (I say 'potentially' because if the trees used are from paper farms and were planted only for the purpose of being cut down, then those wouldn't factor in here.)

Apparently, though he couldn't go into great detail in his note and though he didn't know I'd been following the same story, his firm had been sort of caught between Dow Chemical and the EPA. His job was (quoting him) "to characterize the soil samples using a number of small tests to determine the soil type, etc. and to photograph the cores before they were sampled." He found himself "rushing to complete the process under the supervision of both an EPA and a Dow representative, who wanted to take them to an internal Dow lab as quickly as possible." He also noted that he found it odd that "Dow was running scientific tests for on soil samples for release to the EPA which, if certain levels were detected, would lead to liability and enormous cleanup costs."

Given all of this, I was not surprised to read a little later that Dow claimed that the dioxin hot spot was not as damaging as was being reported.

Likewise, I was not surprised but still taken aback when the news broke last week that a senior EPA official had been fired by the Bush Administration for pursuing the case too thoroughly. The Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post both reported that Mary Gade had been fired:

[F]ollowing months of internal bickering over Mary Gade's interactions with Dow, the administration forced her to quit as head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Midwest office, based in Chicago.

Gade told the Tribune she resigned after two aides to national EPA administrator Stephen Johnson took away her powers as regional administrator and told her to quit or be fired by June 1.

Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it's not an easy one to answer. I don't know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in "An Inconvenient Truth" came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That's when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.

But the drop-in-the-bucket issue is not the only problem lurking behind the "why bother" question. Let's say I do bother, big time. I turn my life upside-down, start biking to work, plant a big garden, turn down the thermostat so low I need the Jimmy Carter signature cardigan, forsake the clothes dryer for a laundry line across the yard, trade in the station wagon for a hybrid, get off the beef, go completely local. I could theoretically do all that, but what would be the point when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who's positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I'm struggling no longer to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for all my trouble?

...

Is eating local or walking to work really going to reduce my carbon footprint? According to one analysis, if walking to work increases your appetite and you consume more meat or milk as a result, walking might actually emit more carbon than driving. A handful of studies have recently suggested that in certain cases under certain conditions, produce from places as far away as New Zealand might account for less carbon than comparable domestic products. True, at least one of these studies was co-written by a representative of agribusiness interests in (surprise!) New Zealand, but even so, they make you wonder. If determining the carbon footprint of food is really this complicated, and I've got to consider not only "food miles" but also whether the food came by ship or truck and how lushly the grass grows in New Zealand, then maybe on second thought I'll just buy the imported chops at Costco, at least until the experts get their footprints sorted out.

...

There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists' projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted. Now truly terrifying feedback loops threaten to boost the rate of change exponentially, as the shift from white ice to blue water in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become more biologically active, causing them to release their vast stores of carbon into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared.

...

As Adam Smith and many others have pointed out, this division of labor has given us many of the blessings of civilization. Specialization is what allows me to sit at a computer thinking about climate change. Yet this same division of labor obscures the lines of connection -- and responsibility -- linking our everyday acts to their real-world consequences, making it easy for me to overlook the coal-fired power plant that is lighting my screen, or the mountaintop in Kentucky that had to be destroyed to provide the coal to that plant, or the streams running crimson with heavy metals as a result.

While it is easy to say that there is some guy in Chinawhois your carbon-footprint evil twin, it's just as easy to say that there's some guy in Texas, driving his Escalade at 85 miles per hour to meet his tee time at a golf course that sucks down more water than the town it is in who is going to have a round of steaks with his buddies afterwards.

As for the rest of the concerns, that it might be too little too late, no matter what you do and the fact that some courses of action might not actually be helpful but harmful, there's always The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Nestle came into Florida and managed to pull off quite the coup.

The company got a permit to take water belonging to Floridians -- hundreds of millions of gallons a year from a spring in a state park -- at no cost to Nestle.

No taxes. No fees. Just a $230 permit to pump water until 2018.

Nestle bottles that water, ships it throughout the Southeast -- much of it to Georgia and the Carolinas -- and makes millions upon millions of dollars in profits on it.

The state granted Nestle permission to draw so much water against the strong recommendation of the local water management district staff. Because drought conditions were stressing the Madison Blue Spring, the staff said the amount of water drawn on the permit should be cut by more than two-thirds.

So while Florida is in a bitter dispute with its state neighbors over water use, it's giving its water away to a private company that bottles and ships it to those very same states.

Because bottling up all this water in plastic bottles and shipping it all over the place is a good idea already so it is even better when the tax payers foot the bill for it.

Now Whole Foods, which has pledged to eliminate plastic bags in all 270 stores by Earth Day, is selling a limited-edition GreeNYC cotton bag in 16 of its New York metropolitan region stores during the month of April at $11.99 a pop. It is the first of a series of cotton bags that will be introduced over each of the next several months by GreeNYC, the PlaNYC environmental campaign which features that lopsided 1970s-era bird (what kind of bird is it again?).

The article goes on to state that each year, the US requires 12 million barrels of oil to produce all these bags. Considering that the US consumes 20.9 million barrels a day (2005 CIA factbook estimate), 12 million barrels is a mere 0.15% of our annual consumption. Even if no one ever used plastic bags ever again, the amount of oil used wouldn't decrease even a quarter of a percent.

There are more effective ways to use less oil, if that's your goal, but they aren't hip and trendy like this and they require lifestyle changes.

If you walk 1.5 miles, Mr. Goodall calculates, and replace those calories by drinking about a cup of milk, the greenhouse emissions connected with that milk (like methane from the dairy farm and carbon dioxide from the delivery truck) are just about equal to the emissions from a typical car making the same trip. And if there were two of you making the trip, then the car would definitely be the more planet-friendly way to go.