The $3 billion federal program was kinda sorta supposed to send inefficient, high-polluting, belchy vehicles to an early grave. Instead it put a lot of new large, inefficient vehicles on the road, according to an AP investigation of new government records.

The most common deals swapped old Ford or Chevrolet pickup trucks for new pickups that got “only marginally better gas mileage,” the analysis found. Old Ford F-150 for new Ford F-150 was the most common exchange. Buyers were 17 times more likely to purchase an F-150 (rated at 16 miles per gallon) than a hybrid Toyota Prius.

At least 15 owners of large pickups cashed them in for new Hummer H3 SUVs that get only 16 mpg. Excuse me, but why did the government even send claims forms to Hummer dealerships? Government officials are “investigating” out how these deals squeaked through, the AP reports.

About 1 in 7 of all deals went for vehicles that got 20 mpg or worse. If you think about it, though, 20 mpg really isn’t such a bad rate ... for 1979.

There were plenty of signals before the one-month summer program began that it was a poor method for cutting pollution (note our roundup of early warnings). There’s also a lively debate on whether it made sense as economic stimulus.

“If we’re looking for the environmental story here, we’re going to be disappointed,” Jeremy Anwyl, of analyst firm Edmunds.com, told the AP. “It might have started out from the perspective of improving the environment, but it got detoured as a way to stimulate the economy.”

That pretty much nails it.

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But that does a disservice to the intention behind this effort, which is to rally support for reform of the nation’s chemical policies. You don’t have to have babies—or even wuv them!—to want the feds to better regulate the toxics that find their way into our homes and bodies.

The facts are out there, and they are not cuddly-wuddly:

Scary stuff, and you can read much more about it, as well as the push for reform, on the Environmental Working Group site.

Erin Brockovich lends her star power to the launch of the Million Baby Crawl.So the Crawl has commenced. A creative spin on the traditional online petition, it finds legendary green-products manufacturer Seventh Generation partnering with consumer-rights advocate Erin Brockovich, eco-pediatrician Alan Greene, and a coalition called Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. Visitors can “create a crawler” (again, you don’t have to have a baby, or ever have had a baby, or ever have thought about having a baby, to participate) or “find a crawler” by zip code or name. The goal, say organizers, is to deliver (ha! deliver!) the signatures to Congress in January—so far they’re at 12,160 and counting.

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I don’t dislike No Impact Man. He is more intentionally political than his detractors portray him to be, and I think his yearlong stunt of living without toilet paper in NYC has been eye-opening for a lot of people, and amusing for many others. I admit that the “happy green” genre of books that are appearing a lot now, exemplified by Sleeping Naked is Green (by Vanessa Farquharson), make me nauseous: a hot twentysomething journalist makes sacrifices such as “buying only green cosmetics” while traveling to eco-resorts by plane and making amends with carbon offsets.  But I was, until recently, a less ostentatious personification of the same middle-class green guilt, and I understand the way we anxiously try to bargain with our angry planet by promising to be better consumers. No one wants to admit that we may not be consumers at all in a few years.

What I want to point out here is that simple living, simple people, are everywhere, and always have been. We recognize the extreme varieties: back-to-the-land types, monastics, Mother Teresa and Ralph Nader, not to mention the homeless, addicts, that crazy lady who takes in all the stray cats. Really they live among us, quite unobtrusive in most cases, and most of them are sane.

My friend Catherine has worked all her adult life in administrative jobs, minimizing her material needs and ignoring most external definitions of success, in order to write poetry. She’s needed to get off the computer for health reasons lately, and is diligently working to set up a small business as a personal organizer (if you’re in Boston and having trouble finding your passport in that firetrap you call your office, check out Catherine’s services at ARoomofOnesOwnOrganizing.com). Another friend, Rick Zemlin, lives on $10,000 a year in San Diego. He feels that working more than 20 hours/week is unhealthy and leaves no room for his spiritual development, which is the focus of his very intentional life. Rick doesn’t write a snappy blog, or have a book contract that I know of, but his Facebook posts are honest and detailed. He did write a disarming article for his church newsletter, detailing his personal expenses, and he’s allowing me to cite it here.

Current Annual Personal Consumption Expenses

5,200 Rent & utilities (bedroom in a 2 bedroom apt. in high-priced California. House phone. No cell.)1,500 Food (lacto-ovo vegetarian, with an emphasis on good nutrition)100 Misc household and personal items100 Clothes (thrift stores provide all of my clothing)1,000 Health care & supplements (no health insurance)750 Transportation (public transit fares & tennis shoes. No car)500 Recreation (movies, eating out, retreats, coffee shops, etc.)650 Travel: to see family & friends550 Gifts consumed (items received gratis & low income medical discounts)—–10,350

I say disarming because Rick’s expenses are remarkably low. He has obviously given up much of what defines the rest of us, including owning a home and having children. But he has a special clarity and warmth, and he seems to be enjoying his life as much as anyone I know.Here’s Rick’s philosophy: “I believe we are each on a journey with our Creator, moving deeper and deeper into the gift of our lives—into the fullness of living. This core life purpose of living fully is joined by a second one, equally important: to help create a world where all are able to do so—a world in which all 6.8 billion of us can thrive. I see this thriving world as the Grand Dream that God holds for us. I believe that we are given all that we need to live into this vision for the world, and that because God is infinitely patient with us we will eventually arrive. It is our destiny, our home.It’s going to cost us, though. (And I think we will gladly pay ... one day.)”Read Rick’s full article here.

I learned a lot about the relative definitions of prosperity by living in Europe in my twenties. (Czechoslovakia, 1990-92, the Czech Republic 1992-95. Same town, same apartment.) When I arrived, shortly after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, a four-member family was typically living in a high-rise apartment with one or two bedrooms. No kudos to the repressive and corrupt regimes of communist Eastern Europe, but material prosperity was adequate, and no one seems much happier 20 years later now that they all have new cars and TVs and debt.

These friends, these memories of other places, and my own experiences of living out of a car or a backpack, are comforting to me now in moments when I’m anxiously scrutinizing the household budget, or wondering where that last 30k we need for the house is going to come from. I remember to breathe deeply and recite my mantra, “In the end, it’s six by six and nothing more.”

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A paper policy, you say? That’s not really fashionable, is it?

Turns out it is. Gucci Group’s policy puts it at the front of a list of major companies—including Tiffany & Co., H&M Group, Hugo Boss, Bulgari, and Ferragamo—that have decided  they don’t want their brands to be associated with the destruction of rainforests or with encouraging climate change.

Worldwide, the degradation and destruction of tropical rainforests is responsible for 20 percent of all annual greenhouse emissions. In Indonesia, which supplies much of America’s paper, a lot of this deforestation is driven by the pulp and paper industry—notably the notorious paper company Asia Pulp and Paper.

This hurts the climate as well as the forests. The carbon emissions resulting from Indonesia’s rapid deforestation account for around 8 percent of global emissions—more than the combined emissions from all cars, trucks, buses, planes, and trains in United States.

The Gucci Group’s comprehensive policy commits it to one of the strongest paper standards in the industry. With its new policy, the Gucci Group has pledged to reduce the amount of paper it uses, eliminate fiber from high-conservation-value forests, and only purchase recycled products or those certified by the Forest Stewardship Council by December 2010.

“Standing rainforests are not a luxury, they’re a necessity if the world wants to stop climate change,” said Mimma Viglezio, executive VP for global communications at the Group. “Our actions are lowering our own carbon footprint, but we hope that they will also raise awareness inside the fashion industry that it’s possible for our industry to make a difference for rainforests and for the climate.”

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Climate change and God

Please join us to hear Amanda read about her adventures throughAmerica’s energy landscape, then stay to chat with her and other Grist staffmembers.

What:  A reading fromAmanda’s new book, Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells—Our Ride to theRenewable Future, followed by a casual reception with free nibbles(and a cash bar)

When:  Thursday, Nov. 12, 7:00 p.m.

Where:  Elliott Bay Book Company,101 South Main St., Seattle, WA 98104

Why:  Are you kidding? Good company, hot topics (andwriters), and did we mention ... free nibbles!

For a sneak peek at Power Trip, read exclusiveexcerpts on Grist.

“Fast, fun, gripping ... Amandarepresents the best of a new, young perspective, a new voice of green.”—Robert Redford

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I do think this collection of blog posts accomplishes what I try todo on my blog—save readers time, cut through the crap, and focus onwhat’s important in climate science, solution, and politics (with ahefty dose of old-media critiques). The trick is it making that allclear in a few, catchy words.

I prefer figures of speech—The Hype About Hydrogen is mybest-selling book. And don’t worry too much about the subtitle—itwill explain what the book covers, and I have a pretty good idea forthat, but don’t want to thwart any of your creativity by putting outany ideas right now.

If we end up choosing your suggestion (or something very similar),you’ll get free copy of the book (woo-hoo) and you can write a guestblog post!  For similar sounding suggestions, the earliest entry wins. You can build on someone else’s idea—in fact, that’s usually how the best title is ultimately found.

Enter as many suggestions as you want. Do use Google to check whether the title is sufficiently original.

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You may have seen the meme circulating around the internet:  some researchers from Australia are claiming that owning a dog has as much impact on the planet as owning an SUV.  I’ll let New Scientist summarize their case:

[A] medium-sized dog…consume[s] 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily in its recommended 300-gram portion of dried dog food…So that gives him a footprint of 0.84 hectares…

Meanwhile, an SUV…driven a modest 10,000 kilometres a year, uses 55.1 gigajoules, which includes the energy required both to fuel and to build it. One hectare of land can produce approximately 135 gigajoules of energy per year, so the Land Cruiser’s eco-footprint is about 0.41 hectares - less than half that of a medium-sized dog.

It’s just the sort of counter-intuitive claim that gets lots of attention on the brave new internet era.  So interesting!  So science-y!  So Twitter-able!

And yet, so false!  Once you sniff around the numbers, it quickly becomes apparent that those researchers are barking up the wrong tree.

Let’s get one thing out of the way:  I’m not a dog owner.  Much tomy kids’ dismay, I don’teven want a pet.  Nor do I own an SUV.  So, in theory, I…er…don’t have a dog in thisfight.  Still, this claim struck me as so wrong that it made the hair on my neck stand up.  And I’d hate to have someone catch scent of this meme and conclude that buying an SUV is no big deal—“It’s not like I’m buying a dog or anything”—if the real numbers don’t support that conclusion.  (That’s the risk of bad information: it can lead us to make choices that are in stark conflict with our values.)

So let’s paws for a moment, and see if this sleeping dog is actually a lie.

First, let’s look at that SUV.  The calculations behind the internet meme say that it’s driven about 6,200 miles per year (10,000 km).  And yet, according to the US Department of Energy, a real SUV in the US is driven an average of 13,700 miles annually.  Already, the internet meme is off by a factor of roughly 2.2.  I haven’t checked whether the 10,000 km figure is reasonable for Australia—but it for the US, their mileage assumptions certainly skews the numbers in favor of SUVs, and against dogs.

And then there’s the total energy estimates.  The pet-pessimists estimate that an SUV (in their calculations, a 4.6 liter Toyota Land Cruiser driven about 6,200 miles) consumes 55.1 gigajoules of energy in both fuel and amortized manufacturing energy every year.  That, too, is low.  A Land Cruiser gets about 15.25 mpg in combined city/highway driving—meaning that if it’s driven 10,000 km, it consumes about 407 gallons of gas, or 53.6 gigajoules worth of energy.  But once I add in the energy used to produce that gas, along with what’s likely a low-ball estimate of the “embodied” energy from vehicle manufacturing, I get get about 74.9 gigajoules—44 percent more than the authors estimate.  Yet again, they’ve low-balled the impacts of the SUV in a way that makes dogs look worse by comparison.  (Here, I’m drawing from the data collection and calculations I did for our CO2-by-transportation-mode charts. And I’m looking only at energy, not at the additional climate and pollution impacts of emissions from tailpipes and smokestacks.)

So even before you start to look at dogs, the authors have underestimated the environmental impacts of SUVs by a factor of at least 3.  And that’s not including the indirect impacts of SUVs—the parking spaces we build for them; the roads and bridges they drive on; the impacts of insurance and licensing operations; etc., etc., ad nauseum.

Then there’s flip side:  the authors’ claims about the impact of feeding pets.  The anti-doggists estimate it takes .84 hectares—or about 2.1 acres of cropland—to meet a a pooch’s food needs for a year.  There are a little over 70 million dogs in the US (the Humane Society says 74.8 million, the veterinarians say 72.1 million, and the pet food industry says 66.3 million, for an average of 71.1 dogs).  So by the authors’ estimates it must take about 150 million acres of US farmland to feed our dogs.  In all, there are 440 million acres of cropland in the US—suggesting that the equivalent of one-third of all US cropland is devoted to producing dog food.

We use the equivalent of a third of all US cropland to feed dogs?  That’s barking mad!

To see why it’s wrong, you can look from the bottom up, at the foods that dogs eat.  Or you can look from the top down, at the aggregate sales of dog food vs. the entire agricultural economy.  I’ll do both.

First from the bottom up:  what, exactly, do dogs eat?  The anti-pet-ites seem do a good job of calculating dogs’ calorie requirements.  Canines wolf down a lot of food:  a mid-sized dog consumes roughly 30 calories per pound of body weight per day.  (Smaller dogs eat as many as 40 calories per pound of body weight, while larger dogs eat as few as 20 calories per pound.  Call it the yapping-to-napping spread.)  I couldn’t find the average weight of dogs in the US, but the median dog breed listed here has an adult weight of 47 pounds.  If that’s representative of US dogs, then the average dog will eat 1,410 calories today, give or take—which, as I read it, is roughly what the authors’ figures imply.

So the real problem with the authors’ calculations isn’t with their estimates of how much each pet eats.  It’s with this statement:

[A] medium-sized dog…consume[s] 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily

Strike that: most dogs DO NOT eat meat and cereals.  With a few exceptions, they eat “meat” and “cereals.”  The “meat,” in particular, tends to be byproducts—things that people in the US simply won’t eat, even in hot dogs. Here’s one description of the ingredients in pet food:

The protein used in pet food comes from a variety of sources. When cattle, swine, chickens, lambs, or other animals are slaughtered, the choice cuts such as lean muscle tissue are trimmed away from the carcass for human consumption. However, about 50% of every food-producing animal does not get used in human foods. Whatever remains of the carcass—bones, blood, intestines, lungs, ligaments, and almost all the other parts not generally consumed by humans—is used in pet food, animal feed, and other products. These “other parts” are known as “by-products,” “meat-and-bone-meal,” or similar names on pet food labels.

Even the cereals dogs eat are often deemed unfit for human consumption. I’m not trying to gross you out here, or encourage you to feed choice cuts to your pooch.  Instead, I think it’s probably a good thing that dogs eat things that humans won’t—since otherwise they really would be eating people food, which really would increase their environmental impact.  But since most dogs get their calories and protein from the waste products of people food, the idea that the environmental impact of dog food is additional to the impact of human food is simply wrong. 

Of course, that’s not to say that dog food has no environmental impact.  Dog food, and meat byproducts generally, provide some financial contribution to the meat industry, and hence to the overall planetary impact of meat production.  Dog food also also requires energy for processing, packaging, and transportation.

Yet when you look at pet food from a macro-economic perspective—that is, from the top down, rather than the bottom up —dog food is little more than a rounding error.  Total retail food sales in the US topped $1.1 trillion in the US in 2008 (see table 36 from the USDA’s Agricultural Outlook statistics.)  But according to the pet food industry, retail dog food sales totaled just $11 billion in 2008.  By that measure, dog food represents about one percent of the total food economy. 

Looking more narrowly at the economics of meat byproducts, I found these USDA estimates of meat “price spreads”, which show that meat byproducts are worth somewhere between 4 and 15 percent of the total value of livestock, depending on the year and the kind of animal.  And obviously, dog food is only one of many uses of those byproducts—there’s also food for other pets, and a variety of industrial uses as well. So based on the economics, there’s just no way to attribute much of the impact of agriculture on our dogs.

In short, whether you go by the macro-economics, or by the actual constituent parts of dog food, there’s simply no principled way to say that the dog food has the same impact as human food.  I’d be very surprised if ANY principled life-cycle assessment found that dog food has more than a small fraction of the overall environmental impact of US agriculture. My guess is that dog food accounts for a maximum of 5 percent of all US crop production, and possibly as little as 1 percent.  That’s a far cry from the one-third that the authors imply.

Of course, dogs have indirect environmental impacts, just as SUVs do:  veterinarians, energy for heating and cooling, the food calories that humans use while walking their dogs, etc.  I won’t even try to tally them up, because there’s no real point.  Just looking at the numbers so far—combining the underestimates of SUV impacts with the overestimates of dog food impacts—the anti-doggites are off by a factor of at least 18, and probably more.

But because I’m doggedly persistent, I’ll mention one final issue.  The authors of the original meme estimate that:

One hectare of land can produce approximately 135 gigajoules of energy per year

I haven’t looked at the original book, so I have no real idea what this means.  A well-located solar power installation can produce roughly 10 times that much energy per acre per year.  Perhaps it’s got something to do with biofuels—maybe the net annual production of corn ethanol per hectare, after accounting for the energy for fertilizer, tractor fuel, and distilling.  Yet having run the numbers before, I’ve concluded that there’s absolutely no way run the US SUV fleet—roughly the size of our dog population—on corn ethanol alone.  There’s just not enough cropland in the country to do it. But obviously, we power our fleet of dogs (and cats and people and horses, etc.—and even some cars) fairly easily with the cropland we’ve got.

Let’s be clear—I’m not claiming that we should ignore the environmental impact of dogs.  That’s one of reasons that I, personally, am reluctant to own one!  But I think that making an empirical claim without doing solid research does a grave disservice to public discourse.  Being wrong can have consequences—including, potentially, encouraging people to make the wrong choices, even if their heart is in exactly the right place.

So I say to the folks who made the original claim:  Bad Researchers!  Fur Shame!!!  And to the rest of you: let’s consider the “dogs are worse than SUVs” meme debunked:  buried in the back yard, put to sleep, and whatever other bad dog pun comes to mind.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Mil, distributed under a Creative Commons license. http://www.flickr.com/photos/danw/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

This post originally appeared at Sightline’s Daily Score blog.

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Q. Dear Umbra,

I am worried that your hotness may be contributing to global warming. I’m not sure what can be done to fix this.

O Zone

A. Dearest O,

You are making me blush. But I am using your letter as a springboard to report some exciting news: In an effort to make my operations more energy-efficient, I am combining my previous twice-weekly column into one weekly, multi-question column. Experts say the shift will result in 26 fewer milligrams of carbon emitted each week. I’ll also be popping up in other places on Grist during the week now, and asking you dearest readers for more input. So keep the questions, suggestions, and blush-inducing compliments coming—we’ll lick this climate thing yet.

Efficiently, Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

What is the most effective thing each of us can do over the next six weeks to help stop global warming?

Ned T.Columbia, Md.

A. Dearest Ned,

I assume your six-week timeframe is pinned on the Copenhagen climate conference, to which we are all looking with bright eyes and big hopes. My advice for the interim is two-pronged: first, pledge to make one change in your own life that will reduce your energy use. Because I’m getting in the holiday spirit, I’ll even say changing one light bulb counts, though I’d like to see you take some bigger steps as well. Second, but only because I couldn’t blurt both ideas at once: Contact your representatives and senators. Tell them you support the passage of strong climate legislation, and tell them Obama would be insane not to go to Copenhagen. Tell them if they don’t do something about climate change immediately, you are going to distribute photographs of them in compromising positions. We all know you don’t possess any such photographs, but that sort of threat will always send a shiver down a politician’s spine. When it comes to the climate crisis, we are no longer above such maneuvers.

Shiveringly, Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

Do you have any recommendations on how to make the annual corporate ‘gift basket’ sustainable, yet memorable?

Erin K.Portland, Ore.

A. Dearest Erin,

Want not, waste not.Good for you for thinking about how to make this consumption-y tradition more sustainable. The obvious choice, of course, would be to forgo the gift basket entirely. Can you get away with that at your company? Why not send your supporters and customers a gift certificate for a nice meal, instead, or donate to a worthy non-profit organization in their name. It seems to me that, in an age when 83 percent of people report receiving gifts they don’t want, the corporate gift basket has run its course. However, if you absolutely must dole out tangible items, see if you can draw any inspiration from our list of creative green gift basket ideas. If all else fails and a more traditional basket is required, make sure you are thoughtful about choosing local, sustainable products. You live in a land of good cheese, beer, and wine, so it shouldn’t be hard.

Scroogily,Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

Can I recycle my receipts?  I’m worried that the type of paper they’re printed on will contaminate the regular paper I’m recycling.

BadRabbitRichmond, Va.

A. Dearest Bad,

What a good question as we approach Holiday Shopping Madness. I can say with nearly 100 percent confidence that you cannot recycle your receipts—at least, those printed on thermal paper, which is the sort of shiny, sheeny paper that faxes used to arrive on. (Remember faxes?) However, as with all such “can I recycle this or that” questions, I’ll advise you to doublecheck with your municipality. Two more things on the receipt front, one creepy, one promising. The creepy one is that some receipts are coated with BPA, the estrogen-mimicking chemical found in baby bottles and can linings. At present, the best advice for avoiding this form of BPA exposure seems to be to decline receipts when you can, and wash your hands after handling them when you can’t. Now for the more promising news: I’ve been hearing about a business model in which you, the customer, can associate your debit card with an e-mail account and request digital receipts, so instead of ending up with a pocket full of non-recyclable thermal paper, you end up with an inbox full instead. Many people seem to be trying this notion, but I have not located one good, central resource that’s figured out how to get it up and running—readers, any insights?

Totally,Umbra

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