People in general have that one sewn up tight.

We, the humans, are finding more and more ways to do ourselves in every year. Coal, oil, motor vehicles, methane, the removal of the carbon-absorbing rainforests, and sheer weight of numbers.

By mid-century, there will be roughly 50% more people in the world than there are today. What will they eat? How will they heat their houses? Where will they find clean water?

I'll either be dead or in my mid-90's, it won't be my immediate problem. It will be someone's - or lots of someones' - and it won't be pretty.

Airlines and cars are just simple proxies for our sheer, ever-increasing numbers.

Walt Kelly, draped over that Saigon bar, was right: "We have met the enemy..."

I've always wondered about those big glassy airline terminals that are super air conditioned in the summer. Sometimes you have to wear a coat in the summer even though all that separates you from a hot, muggy weather are acres of glass. Is anyone considering, in designing new terminals, reducing the air volume of terminals perhaps by reducing the ceiling height, having fewer windows and more insulation, keeping the termperature at 72 degrees instead of 65?

I will get around in a sedan chair carried on the backs of slaves.

You want to reduce green house gas emissions?

Don't get on the plane.

Turn off your laptop.

Shut down the server hosting salon.com

But, but, but. . . Let me guess, there's a compelling reason why your behavior should be granted an exclusion.

Patrick sounds awfully like an apologist for air transport industry. Three large industrial size bags of trash in a trans Atlantic European flight? Well, I've seen lot more trash at a busy McDonald's during lunch hour and mind you there are no newspapers, magazines or other bulky trash here. So where should we start here???

For what it is worth, Airlines aren't necessarily the greatest polluters. Would I rather cross Atlantic in a smoke stack ship belching all the way 3014 NM from NYC to London?

I think air transportation is very efficient any which way you look at it. The other forms of transportation IMHO are lot worse. Frankly, I don't understand why this over whelming concern for being green about everything. When cave man lit the very first fire, I think being green was somewhat at odds with human progress.

"Frankly, I don't understand why this over whelming concern for being green about everything. When cave man lit the very first fire, I think being green was somewhat at odds with human progress."

It never ceases to amaze the degree to which people continue to live in deep denial of the destruction to their own habitat and their ability to separate themselves from the environment of which they are an inextricable part. Addressing issues of population control, destruction to ocean and forest ecosystems, global warming and toxic pollution and waste generation is absolutely essential to the continuation of human life on earth. "Human progress" is a short-term illusion. It's more realistic to view it as a virus that's overtaken its host. Until humans stop seeing themselves at the center of the universe and more a part of a greater whole they will self-destruct.

Thanks for helping putting it out their Patrick.

Would some of these posters like to quote what source suggests human extinction is on the horizon?

Aren't we all just sick of these dramatic visions of environmental apocalypse? They sure sound informed, but on closer inspection how do you know?

What do you suggest we do? Turn off the laptop? Turn off the electricity? Then shut off the water supply, because surely there are workers who drive cars to get to the reservoir to manage our drinking water etc etc. Where do you draw the line?

There is a saying. "Penny-wise, pound-foolish". Turning off my laptop might help but it does nothing on a large scale.

Here's a novel suggestion!

Let's INNOVATE our way out of this situation like we have done so many times before in the past! Lobby your government to give $10 BILLION to the first inventor or consortium to come up with an environmentally-friendly, sustainable and cost efficient energy source. The reason we don't have one today is INCENTIVE. Too much incentive to stay with oil, too little incentive for anyone outside the industry to care.

How many minds would begin working on our energy crisis with a cool $10bn carrot dangling before their very eyes? VERY MANY.

How much is $10bn to the US govt? Not much at all.

Do you take a cholesterol drug? Do you have digital photos of loved ones that you can email around the world? Is your life enriched because you can participate in a democratic process?

Then you have benefited from innovation and surely agree that this is the way forward.

Too bad Chicken Little is still the mascot for environmental concerns today!

I'm all for recycling in the cabins of airliners, when possible. I always figured that on longer flights that everything (cups, cans, trays, whatever) was collected between services in case of turbulence, so there would be less items flying around the cabin.

We're at a point where most people are somewhat conflicted over cleanliness and environmental concerns. For decades we've been taught that for things to be clean they must be encased in plastic, and single use items are even cleaner because they haven't been infected by previous users then gone through a possibly questionable washing process. That, and it's cheaper to just hand out a single use plastic utensil set, wrapped in plastic with a wet-nap, napkin, and salt and pepper packets, than to pay people to separate washable items, wash them, and distribute them as individual pieces on each tray. This combination of cleanliness and inexpensiveness is in conflict with reduced resource usage. There is a mindset change that needs to happen somewhere.

As an aside, when you mention the cleaning crews, I often lament that more people don't treat airline seats (or other similar places, like movie theaters) like they teach Boy Scouts about camp sites, leave it like you were never there. As much work as those cleaning crews do, and the bags of stuff they haul away, they invariable miss things, usually that piece of gum under the armrest you stick your finger in, or a sticky spot on that tray table. I'm not blaming the cleaning crews, they have a tough job to do and probably not much time to do it in. If people would just take their own waste to the receptacles rather than rely on others to pick up after them, it would be much nicer.