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?

What a marvelous piece and introduction/mapping of some of the global climate change militia heads. You obviously could have set up a list of 50 or 100 or whatever. Maybe a follow up piece in a few months on everyone's suggestions for people omitted.

I am printing the article out to send to board members as a primer on the breadth of the climate change issue. Keep up the coverage!

In reading about the leading environmentalists in the world, it was interesting and disheartening to note only two women made the list. Women widely do most of the work in this world (75%, including most at home and much of the out of home work). Yet, when it comes to talking about making change, we seem to forget about the leadership and support roles women play that make it possible for change to occur. I applaud Salon.com for covering envrionmental policy in a manner that challenges the backwardness of the current administration. However, focusing primarily on men provides yet another example of women as invisible. And, yes, there is a connection between women being rendered invisible in the media and in other facets of life.