Tips for stress-free holiday travel
(Photo: Getty Images) One of the best parts of the holiday season is connecting with friends and family. But traveling during the holidays can be a real hassle. Whether you’re taking an afternoon drive or flying across the country, there are plenty of ways to make the trip less stressful. Many of these tips will also save you money and are easier on the planet. Pack light so you don t have to pay for or deal with the hassle of checked luggage. You won t have to arrive at the airport as early, wait around after your flight gets in, or worry about lost bags. It also cuts down on fuel use because the more weight a plane, train, car, or bus carries, the more fuel it uses. So if you re driving, that translates into spending less time and money at the gas pump. OneBag offers many creative tips for lightening your load. Take public transportation to the airport. It s less expensive than taking a car service or paying for parking. Airport parking lots can fill up quickly during peak holiday travel times, and it can be a real nightmare to deal with full lots. Bring your own healthy snacks. You ll avoid waiting on long lines or paying top dollar for sub-par food at the airport. Carry your own water bottle. If the airport has water fountains, it will save you the cost of having to buy overpriced bottled water, which can quickly add up, especially if you re travelling with a family of four. If you can’t find those fountains, you can still ask the flight attendant to fill up your bottle so you don t have to keep asking for water. Carpool with friends or family members who are going to the same destination. It s more fun than travelling alone and having company will help alleviate stress when you hit the inevitable holiday traffic. Planning your trip ahead of time and taking the shortest route possible will also help save you time, money, and the hassle of getting lost. Stay home and use free or inexpensive technology, such as Skype, to connect to far-flung relatives. Environmental journalist Lori Bongiorno shares green-living tips and product reviews with Yahoo! Green’s users. Send Lori a question or suggestion for potential use in a future column. Her book, Green Greener Greenest: A Practical Guide to Making Eco-smart Choices a Part of Your Life is available on Yahoo! Shopping and Amazon.com. Check out Yahoo! Green on Twitter and Facebook.
Search for Loch Ness Monster nets 100,000 golf balls
Photo: Wikimedia Commons Golf and the Loch Ness Monster: These two symbols of Scotland collided in an environmentally disastrous way this month when scientists searching for Nessie found 100,000 golf balls instead. Footage from the expedition shows numerous golf balls illuminated against the dull brown of the lake bottom. “From the moon to the bottom of Loch Ness, golf balls are humanity’s signature litter in the most inaccessible locations, U.K. lawmaker Patrick Harvie told CNN. And though the golf balls left on the moon by astronauts back in 1971 would have dissolved a long time ago, here on Earth, golf balls take much longer to decompose and they release a high quantity of heavy metals in the process. The core of golf balls contain dangerous levels of zinc, which attaches itself to ground sediment and poisons surrounding plants and wildlife. Torben Kastrup Petersen, course manager for the Danish Golf Union, says the full impact of golf ball pollution is unknown. About 300 million golf balls are lost or discarded every year in the United States alone. There has been very little research on the environmental impact of golf balls, but it’s safe to say the indicators are not good. We are planning to collaborate with environmentalists in America to conduct more tests to fully explore the extent of the problem. Stephanie Rogers is a regular contributor to Mother Nature Network, where this post originally appeared.More from Mother Nature Network Scientists perform sex change operation on a papayaFree bird: Famous turkey pardons in historyShark performs c-section surgeryLazarus species: 13 extinct animals foundAnimal conservationist Jane Goodall on ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’Check out Yahoo! Green on Twitter and Facebook.
Reduce, reuse, recycle
People living in the UK throw away well over 28 million tonnes per year of rubbish from their homes, the same as three and a half million double decker buses. Unfortunately, only around 27% of this waste is recycled while most of the rest is tipped into landfill sites – better known as rubbish tips, [...]
Action on climate change delayed: Copenhagen won’t be binding, Congress won’t pass bill this year
As rumors have suggested for the past several weeks, a binding agreement won’t be reached in Copenhagen this December. Leaders attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation this past weekend met and decided that the Copenhagen conference would be used to come up with an interim nonbinding political agreement and to set a date and time for a legally binding one sometime next year. The goal of cutting global emissions by 50 percent by 2050 has been scrapped and instead a 2007 goal of reducing energy intensity — emissions per unit of economic output — by 25 percent by 2030 is being restated, but again, it won’t be binding. A big reason for the push back is the U.S. Congress’ inaction on a climate change bill this year. Without a clear commitment from the U.S. to cut emissions, other countries are hesitant to make any pledges of their own. In the past few days, members of Congress have said a decision on a climate bill won’t happen before the first half of 2010. For those of us who were keeping our hopes up for a significant agreement to come out of Copenhagen and for a climate bill this year, this news is incredibly disappointing. One positive thing to hold onto is that the Obama administration seems determined to make some progress even while Congress falters, most notably with the EPA gearing up to regulate greenhouse emissions starting in 2011. via NY Times Image via APEC Singapore 2009
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Outdoor gear, apparel and adventure travel information with reviews and feature articles.Offers camping and hiking gear, apparel, and packs, as well as skiing and snowboarding accessories.Offers outdoor apparel and equipment for hunting, fishing, and camping. Locations in Clare and Gaylord.Fishing reports, articles, forums. Listings of resorts, campsites, and fishing guides.Maps, images, and fish facts for [...]
Ask the Expert: Why We Need Health Reform
Senator Tom Daschle on why we need health reform–why it is good for families, for doctors, for businesses, and for governments. Has anyone seen these machines I saw on 2 occasions a while ago, a bubblegum type machine where you put in 2 quarters and [...]
Cordis Initiates Nationwide Recall of CROSSOVER Sheath Introducer
Cordis Corporation announced today a nationwide voluntary recall of all lots of the CROSSOVER Sheath Introducer due to complaints about stretching or fracture of the sheath during use. The CROSSOVER Sheath Introducer is a product developed and manufactured by Thomas Medical Products, Inc., [...]
Four incredibly easy, slow-cooker side dishes for Thanksgiving
(Getty Images / Photo Illustration) Stephanie O’Dea isn’t a professional chef in fact, she claims she isn’t much of a cook at all she’s just a mom who loved her slow-cooker and had to start a blog for research at work. Her blog, A Year of Slow Cooking, became hugely popular, and she created a cookbook of some of the best recipes from her yearlong experiment with slow cooking. The book includes recipes for classic slow-cooked fare, like soups and stews, plus lots of surprising recipes like peppercorn steak, Rice Krispies treats, baby food, and crayons (yes, crayons!). The cookbook also features tons of side dishes perfect for Thanksgiving. O’Dea had seven slow-cookers going last Thanksgiving with all of the recipes plugged in and cooking by noon, leaving her time to clean up and even relax before her guests arrived. A relaxing Thanksgiving? Sounds amazing. Even if you’re not hosting your own Thanksgiving dinner this year, O’Dea says a slow-cooked side is perfect to bring over to your relatives’ place, because although oven space may be limited, you can always find an outlet to heat up your dish when you cook in a slow-cooker. (Hyperion ) Enjoy these recipes courtesy of Stephanie O’Dea’s new book, Make It Fast, Cook It Slow: The Big Book of Everyday Slow Cooking, and let us know any easy cooking tips you’ll be using this holiday. Slow-cooker cornbread stuffing recipe Buttery cornbread gives this stuffing a new spin. You can easily make this slow-cooker dish vegetarian or gluten-free. Slow-cooker cranberry sauce recipe This sweet slow-cooker Thanksgiving staple is almost as easy as the canned stuff and even tastier. Slow-cooker pecan-topped baked sweet potatoes recipe Pecans and sweet potatoes: a delicious seasonal combination. With the slow-cooker, you ll enjoy that smell of them cooking for five sweet hours. Slow-cooker green bean casserole recipe These slow-cooker green beans keep their taste and crunch; it’s the perfect way to get some veggies into the holiday meal. More from The Daily GreenHow to Cook 10 Tricky Fall FoodsFantastic Fall RecipesHomemade Dessert RecipesBoxed Wines and Pairing IdeasFive Recipes for Thanksgiving LeftoversReprinted with permission of Hearst Communications, Inc Check out Yahoo! Green on Twitter and Facebook.
How did you get to work on World Car Free Day?
We’ve had some whacky and inventive ways of getting to work today, making World Car Free Day a fun day for employees at The Consortium. We’ll post up some photo’s later this week. Did you drive to work today or did you make an effort to go car free? Let us know by leaving a comment.
Everything you know about going green is wrong
(Photo: Peter Dazeley / Getty Images) What if that brand new Prius is worse for the environment than a 1995 Chevy Suburban, despite getting 38 more miles to the gallon? What if that sirloin, shipped to the steakhouse from a newly deforested pasture in the Amazon, means less to the global climate than a hill of individually wrapped jellybeans? What if using that old avocado-green clothes washer turned out to be better for the environment than the brand new Energy Star model? These are the types of thoughts one thinks after reading two recent reports by Joshuah Stolaroff, who could do far more to turn “going green” on its head than your average faceless bureaucrat. Stolaroff was at a low enough level at the Environmental Protection Agency when he wrote Opportunities to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions Through Materials and Land Management Practices that he can’t even “speak for the agency” when discussing it. The Product Policy Institute, which published is next paper, Products, Packaging and Greenhouse Gas Emissions encouraged him to talk, but the only reporters who sat in on his recent press call were writing for publications serving readers in the solid waste industry. (The second paper was like the first, but included a key addition: Consideration of the greenhouse gas emissions embodied in imported goods, not just domestically produced items.) The reports have the same conclusion: The stuff we buy and the packaging that comes with the stuff we buy represents our biggest contribution to global warming — far more so than the amount of electricity our stuff uses or the amount of fuel our stuff burns on the highway. As a nation, the products we buy, and the plastic and paper those products are packaged in, account for 44% of our greenhouse gas emissions — dwarfing all other sources of pollution. It’s all about stuff. Good stuff, bad stuff, fuel-efficient stuff, organic stuff: The problem is too much stuff. Powering every AC unit, boiler, and hot water heater in the United States adds up to less than half the impact of our stuff — just 21%. Driving our cars, or — why not? — Hummers, as the case may be, accounts for just 13%, and food just 12%. Even all our guilt-ridden, globe-trotting vacations and every one of those celebrity private jet trips — “non-local passenger transport” in the parlance of these reports — accounts for just 9% of all global warming pollution produced by the United States. And, in a note that makes you want to gouge out both eyes with an electric fork, the electricity used to run all our appliances amounts to just 7% of our nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. The papers are written for policy wonks, encouraging such practices as lifecycling responsibility for manufacturers, so that the cell phone you buy today is dismantled and remade by the same company that manufactured it. “There’s enough evidence here that we should institute policies around products or materials to control greenhouse gas emissions,” Stolaroff said. Good advice. But what about us? Even as an expert on the topic, Stolaroff was surprised by the way the report affected him. “In the process of the report I became convinced that recycling is much more important than I thought it really was,” he said. “Particularly appliances, cars, electronics, and construction and demolition debris — those turn out to be pretty important. I never really thought about that. We hear a lot about recycling containers, but we’re much less advanced in terms of recycling durable goods, like building debris and furniture. There’s lots of potential to prevent greenhouse gas emissions.” Which isn’t to say that energy efficiency doesn’t matter (or that other studies don’t contradict some of these findings) … but Stolaroff’s studies suggest that the types of products we buy and how much stuff we buy in the first place matter most. Choosing to buy products made from recycled materials, that can be repaired or recycled — or choosing to rent what we don’t need to buy … these amount to some of the most important choices we make for the environment.More from The Daily Green15 Things to Do That Actually Help the Environment15 Ways to Give, Without Giving “Stuff”How Green Are You? Take the Quiz30+ Money-Saving Green Tips10 Idiot-Proof Eco TipsReprinted with permission of Hearst Communications, Inc Check out Yahoo! Green on Twitter and Facebook.
