So you want to be green...

[lproven]

Trevor Blackwell is a remarkably smart man. Thus, his back-of-an-envelope thoughts on recycling and carbon use are shockingly unconventional. I suspect he might be right, though, although I suspect that a bigger-picture view might gainsay him.

How can I reduce global warming?.

OK, nobody has actually asked me this question. But I'm going to answer it anyway, because I have a theory. Global warming is caused by taking carbon out of the ground (as oil or coal) and burning it, releasing the carbon into the atmosphere. Besides using less energy, you can help correct the imbalance by burying carbon back in the ground. One convenient way to do this is by not recycling paper products. Harvesting trees to produce paper and then burying the paper in the ground is an easy and effective way to sequester carbon from the atmosphere. Contrary to popular belief, leaving forests alone does not sequester carbon, because when the trees die the carbon is released back to the atmosphere as the wood rots. It's also worthwhile to not recycle yard waste, though most cities won't accept large amounts of waste in the regular garbage.

By the way, recycling glass, plastic, and steel cans is useless. It doesn't use significantly less energy to recycle them than to make new ones. The only household things worth recycling are aluminium cans and batteries.