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The Next Good Idea

Save Trees? Pay People NOT To Cut Them Down

This seems like a simple and very good idea — even the United Nations is behind it: want to keep some trees on the planet?  Pay the people who own them, NOT to cut them down.  People pay for them to do the opposite, yet the entire world benefits, particularly the developed nations, i.e. big carbon producers.

Categories
The Next Good Idea

Wine In A Box

America has surpassed Italy, and will soon catch France to become the largest consumer of wine in the world.  All that wine has to move miles to get to your glass, and thus leaves behind quite a carbon footprint.  Pleasure doesn’t need to leave behind such a brutal wake though.  If we could just climb down off our snob-appeal high chair, and embrace such a simple solution, we would be a few steps closer to nirvana.

Tyler Coleman of DrVino.com had an excellent op-ed/solution in yesterday’s NY Times.
Categories
The Next Good Idea

Carbon Footprint Label

We have labels on our food to alert us as to what is in it, shouldn’t we also know the environmental costs of the products we consume?  If we knew that when we drink ordinary water imported from Fiji, we are contributing X to the carbon emission crisis, would we change our habits?  How would we get manufacturers to post a simple label on all products?

The New York Times had a relevant article back in April, posted here.  Evidently, Tesco, Britian’s largest supermarket chain has voluntarily introduced just such a system.  Can we import that?