The city of San Francisco appears to be doing an exceptional job at diverting material from the landfill. The recent announcement that they are only 3% away from their goal of 75% recycling is pretty noteworthy. I applaud them. I do want to offer some words of caution. I suggest they do some careful analysis of their recycling efforts to ensure that their efforts aren’t doing more environmental damage than good.

Sometimes, in our race to recycle everything possible, we forget that recycling does take energy; energy for initial processing of material, transportation, and energy for final processing into a useable product. Believe me, I am all for recycling, it is part of what we do. The key is responsible recycling. If San Francisco is achieving a net improvement to the environment (as measured by a non-biased, non-partisan person/organization), then the rest of us should certainly see what we can learn from them to improve recycling across the country and offer the plaudits they deserve.

I hope you all have a happy Earth Day and that you do at least one thing today to keep the Earth a little greener. Better yet, start a new habit today that will. At my daughter’s school, they challenged all the kids to keep the TV off for the entire week. Hopefully they are not turning in those TV hours for computer hours – that would simply be a diversion from one use of electricity to another.

All-electric cars are coming down the pipe and thus the paradigm will begin to officially shift. The car is still too expensive for many middle and lower income Americans, even when you consider that you don’t have to put any oil or gas into it. It’s still a large upfront cost while the gas and oil are spread out over time. Regardless, I hope they get the approval quickly and begin work right away. Tesla may very well become the the GM (hopefully just in size, not in stupidity) of the new automakers landscape. Considering the current state of GM and Chrysler, if they don’t catch on soon and begin to produce a viable, long-range, all-electric car, they will find it hard to not fade into the sunset of obsolete car companies.

Turning plastics back into the oil from which they were created is wonderful technology. If they are producing enough oil to make money on the process, then it would seem the only thing they have to worry about is gathering enough material consistently to keep them in the black. I certainly wish them the best and hope they can continue to grow their market and expand the use of this technology.

This new discovery seems to offer a surprisingly good and quick way to reverse the effects of global warming with the easy absorption of CO2 particles. However, it also raises a possible dilemma. If we start using these rock formations to absorb CO2, which will reduce emissions currently in the air, do we run the risk of doing it too fast – faster than the system can adapt and thus producing global cooling? Hopefully, they consider this possibility before they start. It took many years to get where we are and I think the ecosystem has tried to adapt but has been unsuccessful. If we reverse it too quickly, will the ecosystem have time to adapt to the change?