Salon & Rolling Stone present �Drive-through environmentalism� � you can save the planet without ever getting out of your car!

That�s the uninspiring overall thrust of this collection of essays. While your article notes that 70% of US energy needs go to transportation, not a single one of your environmental heroes proposes a fundamental change to the transportation system. Instead we are treated to palid proposals for hybrid SUVs.

Currently, our cars waste about 99% of the energy they burn. The engines operate at about 20% thermal efficiency, and then nearly all the resulting power goes to moving the car itself, which weighs 20 times as much as its typical cargo load. So only about 1% of the energy in the fuel is actually utilized to move a passenger.

Amory Lovins, the �Visionary� of your crew, has an answer. His �Revolution� SUV would increase average fuel economy by an astounding factor of 400%. So when his Revolution is done, an auto will use 4% of its energy to move its occupant, and only waste 96%.

In the meantime, high-paid policy wonks and Hollywood high-rollers will trade in their SUVs for flashy new hybrids. Middle-income working people will buy the used SUVs and drive them for another 15 years. Over a couple of decades, the average fuel wastage of the entire American fleet will creep down ever-so-slowly, while in China, the number of cars increases by a factor of 10.

But the entire supply chain of the auto-industrial complex will roll on undisturbed, building roads, molding plastic dashboards, and designing ever more expensive child-restraint seats to safeguard the motorists of tomorrow.

Your article gives no hint that there are thousands of environmentalists who are working on ways to drastically reduce, if not eliminate, the use of cars. The next time you introduce �28 leaders who are fighting to stave off planetwide catastrophe�, could you include at least one who dares to say that cars are killing us?

OK, driving a hybrid might seem like a small step forward (at least if it's a small hybrid, not a big heavy overpowered SUV hybrid). But this emergency calls for much more than small steps forward. To get the kind of emission reductions that will make a difference, we need a drastic reduction in the number of cars on the road.

Those who choose to live car-free now will be a big step ahead, when fuel starts getting scarce and prices double a few times. Someday, it will seem bizarre and extravagant to consider using a two-ton chunk of metal to move one 150-pound person. If that day comes soon enough, we might stand a chance of slowing down climate change.

jim wrote: "personal vehicle use makes up only a small fraction of total fossil fuel consumption. ... the abandonment of personal car dependence would be a nice gesture, but relative to the larger problem, it's the equivalent of trying to bale water out of a sinking ship with a dixie cup."

I beg to differ. According to US Dep't of Energy figures, transportation used over 40% of all the oil used in the US in 2004. Furthermore, transportation accounted for 28% of the total energy usage in the US in 2004. And of that energy, gasoline-powered vehicles accounted for about 70%, meaning that all the diesel trucks and freight trains combined used less than half as much energy as gas-burners. So it looks to me like abandonment of personal car dependence would be a major part of any solution – especially if we consider also that the manufacture of all those gas-burners is itself a huge energy drain.

The train of thought in several previous letters seems to be:

1. Polonium-210 is readily available as an ingredient in anti-static brushes;

2. Therefore it would be a simple matter to poison someone with polonium-210, in such a way that the death would be very rapid (in the order of weeks rather than many years).

Let me be the first to admit I know nothing about the specific radiological properties of polonium, other than what I've read in these articles and letters. However, none of your letter-writers, who have so quickly concluded that Salon's article was a crock, have dealt with a couple of key issues cited by John Large:

1. The isotope suspected in the Litvinenko case has a very short half-life (making it far from obvious, to my untutored mind, how these ubiquitous anti-static brushes could be the source of a quick-acting radiological poison);

2. When such a metal contaminant is ingested, most of it is normally screened out in the gut, and very little will actually pass into the bloodstream. (Therefore, just because polonium can be acquired simply as part of an anti-static brush, it does not follow that it is at all simple to get that polonium into the human body and make it stay there to do its harm.)

If anyone can address these issues more convincingly and logically than Mr. Large did in the interview, I'd be quite interested.