The Copenhagen conference on limiting emissions starts in a few days time and there’s a strong belief in many western nations that we shouldn’t really be doing anything about controlling emissions while major polluters like China and India are doing nothing.

Hell we know that they’re doing nothing don’t we? I mean you only have to look at the video that was coming out of China during the Olympic Games to know that the air quality over there is total crap and they’re so obviously doing absolutely nothing to try and fix that.

So if they’re doing nothing about it then why should we bother reducing emissions in our own country?

It makes us feel good now doesn’t it to be taking a stand about protecting our environment and demanding that others do something first. I mean it’s the right thing to do and we shouldn’t really be paying any attention to those environmentally friendly wimps who think that we’re destroying the planet.

Hell what would they know about anything. Let’s go right on polluting until the Chinese and Indians get serious about reducing pollution and then maybe we’ll think about it.

Yep that’s what we should be doing and it makes a man feel good to thump his chest now and again and demand that the Government does something positive … like doing nothing.

So do you really think that the Chinese are doing nothing about polluting the atmosphere with all those emissions? Do you really think that they don’t care if the planet dies and do you really think that they’re ignoring the fact that global warming is very real and it’s happening very quickly?

Perhaps they may not seem to be acting quickly … after all the air was pretty thick in Beijing during the Olympics and when anyone talks about emissions in China on television we’re always shown big chimneys belching lots of carbon out into the atmosphere … but who says that they aren’t taking steps to reduce emissions?

As in any western country one of the first places to start cutting emissions in China are those pollutants coming from the vehicles that you’ll find on Chinese streets and those emissions are being reduced. Well over 10 million new vehicles have been sold in China so far this year and many of them have come from manufacturers outside of China.

Toyota, Ford, General Motors, Nissan and many of the European manufacturers are making up a large proportion of those 10 million plus cars and they’re being sold in China with all the anti-pollution technology fitted to them that we have in the same cars that are sold here.

So the pollution levels are being reduced and the Chinese car makers are doing their part too. Maybe they’re going even further than car makers in other countries.

How many major car makers here in the United States are developing electric vehicles? You could count them on the fingers of one hand but in China every single major car maker and there’s a lot more of them than there are in the United States … and some smaller ones too … have electric vehicles close to hitting the production line and most of them have prototypes out on the roads being tested right now.

And over there people are prepared to buy those low-emission cars because they want to reduce the amount of pollution in the air. Here in the United States we have to be encouraged to buy anything but a huge V8 monster that guzzles gas at an incredible rate. We have to be paid rebates by the Government to buy new energy efficient cars that don’t pollute the atmosphere as much as our old ones.

Then there’s the question of what is going to be the take-up rate for hybrid vehicles here in the US? It would be interesting to compare figures even now … before the local Chinese hybrid vehicles hit the market.

So with Copenhagen getting closer let’s not fool ourselves that we’re the only ones doing something about pollution. Let’s not be misled by the propaganda that the climate change skeptics want to put out to convince us that China and other developing countries are doing nothing about reducing emissions.

The fact is that they are … they might not be doing enough just yet but they certainly are doing more than our climate change skeptics would have us believe. And there is no doubt that the governments of those countries are realists … they know what is happening to the planet and they know that they need to do their part to save the planet so let’s cut the BS and encourage and support our leaders as they go to Copenhagen with a promise that we will cut emissions and help save our planet.

There are times when you just have to wonder about the intelligence and motives of the people we elect to lead us. It seems that somewhere in their life-span they had a chance to check their brains at the door and have never bothered to go back and collect them.

A perfect example of what I mean is happening right now over in Australia. Over there the party that is in power at the Federal level is desperately trying to get some laws through their parliament that will restrict the amount of greenhouse gases that are being pumped into the air.

That’s vitally important because Australia is currently the biggest per-capita producer of environmentally destructive emissions in the western world. That doesn’t mean that they produce more greenhouse gases than any other country but they do produce more for each man, woman and child in Australia than is produced for each man, woman and child in China or the United States or any other country.

So the Aussies want to get their emissions down … and so they should … they are helping to push the rate of global warming and their country is one of the countries that seems to be most effected by the changes in climate.

However, the political party that isn’t in power in Australia is opposed to the laws that have come before their Parliament. That party seems to be full of climate-change skeptics … people who just don’t believe that it’s happening … and they are making it almost impossible for the government to get those important laws passed.

It’s bad enough that the opposition to the laws is coming from climate-change skeptics but one of the loudest of those climate-change skeptics is a senator from the Australian state that is most affected by climate change.

In his state a once mighty river has stopped flowing … there’s just not enough water coming down the river to keep its mouth open and there isn’t even enough coming down the river to develop any lakes around the mouth of the river. So you ust have to ask yourself if this guy is even in vague touch with reality … if he was he wouldn’t be a skeptic at all.

It makes you wonder how he can deny what is happening to his state right in front of his eyes.

In another part of the country a couple of residents of a small town had been complaining to their council about a huge build up of plastic shopping bags in a creek behind the town dump. That creek flows into a very environmentally sensitive bay just a few miles away from where the plastic bags were.

Fortunately the flow of water in that creek has been quite low but all it would have taken for all those plastic bags to get washed into the sea was one heavy fall of rain. Despite numerous complaints to the administrative staff and to elected representatives nothing was done even though all it would have taken to fix the problem was 10 minutes work by a couple of guys from the dump.

Of course politicians … even at the local level … seem to lack commonsense and all those plastic bags would still be a ticking time bomb, just waiting for some heavy rain to come and wash them into the sea where they could seriously damage the environment but for the press but for a guy with a camera.

One of those residents who had tried to do the right thing and get the local authorities to clean up the mess finally took the story to the local press and as soon as someone at the dump spotted the local paper’s photographer the mess was cleaned up in a flash.

How sad is that? If the guy with the camera hadn’t turned up the mess would still be there. It makes you wonder how the local politicians would have explained all those dead fish and turtles that would have washed all neatly wrapped in those damned plastic bags.

But things like that aren’t just happening in other countries … they’re happening right here in America too. How can politicians in New York sit around and do nothing about recycling? How can politicians in every city and town that doesn’t recycle justify their inaction?

Only this week in Prosser, one of the towns in the tri-cities cluster, the administration tried to encourage the local politicians to get off their collective backsides and invest in some recycling crates that would have been provided to every household. These days a move like that is a no-brainer … but not to the civic leaders of Prosser.

They very quickly made it clear to the administration that no money would be allocated to recycling crates this year and probably not next year either. They might install a few more recycle bins around the city but local residents could forget about recycling crates … that was just not going to happen.

So as the planet staggers on and struggles with greenhouse gasses, rubbish that’s becoming too much for landfills to cope with and politicians who refuse to believe what’s happening right there in front them it’s time that we drew a line in the sand and made it plain to our elected representatives that they either get with the recycling plan and start saving the environment or they can kiss their cushy jobs and positions goodbye.

There’s no doubt that we live in scary times … but then so did our parents and some of us who are old enough to remember the cold war. Back then everyone knew that the Russians were sitting there with their finger on the button that would launch a gazillion intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads and the end of the world was just one button-push away.

Somehow we muddled through and now the threat of Armageddon has drawn back although just how the change that reduced the risk of nuclear war came about is perhaps a little unclear.

These days though we’ve got another threat … the threat of us killing ourselves through an unstoppable series of environmental disasters that seems to be just about ready to engulf us. For those of us who were around when the nukes were so close things don’t seem a whole lot different.

Back then our leaders talked a lot and expended large amounts of hot air in telling us that there wasn’t a problem … we didn’t have to worry … nothing was going to happen. Today we here much the same thing … there’s nothing to worry about … the fact that pollution and global warming is killing the planet is just a figment of our imagination and so what if a few small island nations in the Pacific disappear under water … it’s nothing to worry about.

Unlike back then when the global threat could only be handled on a government to government scale these days the problems and many of the solutions are much closer to home. Back then it was statesmen who kept the world from destroying itself … these days it’s the little people who can do a whole lot more to prevent that destruction.

Now it’s people like you and me who can do things to improve the environment at a local level and so set an example for people beyond our horizon. Even if we don’t have the ability to go out and clean up our local environment due to ill-health or incapacity we can still encourage those who can and when we encourage them they’ll begin to feel empowered and they will make a difference.

Yes … little people can make a difference. People like a Girl Scout in Hackettstown who, as part of her efforts to be awarded a Girl Scout Gold Award set up a recycling program for fishing line. Don’t laugh … getting people to recycle fishing line is an incredibly important step in saving our environment.

The amount of loose fishing line that gets dumped into our rivers and oceans every day is an absolute disgrace and recreational fishermen should be ashamed of what their fellow fishers are doing to the environment. All that loose fishing line gets tangled around turtles and dolphins and numerous species of fish as well as bird life and it kills them and there’s nothing sporting about that.

So we need to do something about the amount of fishing line that doesn’t come home after each fishing trip and one girl in one small town here in America is doing something about it. She’s set up recycling bins for fishing line around the foreshores of where she lives and several times a week she goes and empties them.

It’s a tiny step by one single person but that’s what we need to be encouraging. We need to be encouraging people like her who are prepared to make the effort to do something positive for the environment. At the same time we need to be telling others about the work she is doing and encouraging the local authorities in the towns were we live to be getting involved in collecting that sort of rubbish so that it doesn’t get dumped into the environment.

Then there’s Veena Sahajwalla … a scientist over in Australia who has discovered a way of incorporating plastic bags … that terrible scourge that blights the environment in every western country … into steel making. Yes, I know, incorporating plastic bags into steel making sounds like something dreamed up by a delusional mad professor but the process actually works and the patents that Professor Sahajwalla has been awarded are real.

Yet when she was first starting out would anyone have believed that plastic bags could become an important part of steel making? Hell I bet that scientist got laughed at so many times that lesser people would have given up but the environment is potentially looking a little healthier because people believed in her and encouraged her.

And that’s what we need to be doing … we need to be encouraging people to make an effort to save the environment. When we leave action to just a few things can be achieved … eventually. When we encourage others and they encourage us what we achieve may be a whole bunch of little things that all add up to something huge.

Did you know that right now you’re sitting on top of one of the most effective natural forms of heating and cooling known to man? Can you see it? It’s right there you know … just below where you’re sitting … if you’re sitting at anything close to ground level.

Maybe you can even reach out and touch it if you’re sitting outside as you read this. Have you worked out yet what that natural source of heating and cooling is? It’s the earth … that thing that we build our houses on … the thing we walk on … the thing that we live on.

See, I told you that it was just below you and no, I’ve haven’t gone crazy … the earth really is the most effective natural form of heating and cooling known to man. Unfortunately the name that we give to this heating and cooling effect is ‘geothermal’ and of course that instantly conjures up images in our mind of steaming geysers and hot mud and heat welling up from magna deep below the earth’s crust … and it’s not that at all.

Just for a moment I want to take you away from where you are and whisk you off to a strange little town called Coober Pedy in the Australian outback and I’m going to set you down in one of the streets in the town. It’s a residential street but it’s nothing like the residential streets around where you might live.

Here the street is just red dirt and all around is red dirt … almost as far as you can see there’s red dirt … and there’s something puzzling about this residential street … there are no houses as we know them. Oh sure if we look over towards the main street we can see the gas station, the grocery store and a few other shops but there are hardly any houses so how can I call this a residential street?

I can call it a residential street quite easily because that’s exactly what it is … or as near to a residential street as one can get in Coober Pedy … but you won’t see the type of houses that you’re accustomed to around here because the houses are all underground.

Remember, this is outback Australia where it’s hot … damned hot … during summer and rather cold during winter so when the first settlers came to Coober Pedy to mine opals they decided that the best place to live was underground where they could take advantage of the geothermal effects of the earth.

Of course back then those early miners wouldn’t have had a clue what geothermal meant but they did know that in summer the coolest place to be was underground and in winter the warmest place to be was … you guessed it … underground.

And that’s where the people of Coober Pedy have stayed because the heating and cooling is cheap and very effective and these days there are some very comfortable houses built underground in Coober Pedy.

Now, before we leave Australia I want to take you to a totally different part of the country. This time we’re standing outside a very attractive two-story house on the coast in Queensland. It’s the middle of summer and once again, it’s damned hot outside and humid as well… in fact it’s so uncomfortable that the sweat is just dripping off us.

The friendly owners of the house invite us in and take us up to the top floor where there are big glass windows that stretch from floor to ceiling and you’re blown away by the views out over the water to Fraser Island.

That view really captures your senses … but then a little voice in the back of your mind starts telling you that you’re not feeling hot any more … you’re feeling rather cool and it’s very pleasant inside the house despite the hot temperature and humidity outside all those glass windows.

You compliment the owners on the powerful air-conditioning that they must have installed and you wonder what their power bill must be like and then you hear them telling you that they have no air-conditioning and they never need it.

At first you think that their crazy but then they show you that their house is actually built into the side of a hill. In fact most of the bottom floor is buried in the side of the hill and when they take you over to the internal stairway that you climbed up to get to the top floor you feel the cool air coming up from below.

If you don’t want to live underground that’s another way of harnessing the cooling and heating effects of the earth … but maybe it won’t work for you.

Maybe you don’t want to build a new house partly buried in the side of a hill and maybe you couldn’t cope with the idea of living underground … maybe you just want to stay in your own normal suburban house built on an average suburban block. Does that mean that you can’t take advantage of geothermal heating and cooling?

Well no it doesn’t … there are geothermal heat pump systems that are available that will heat and cool a normal house on a normal suburban block of ground. They utilize a system of pipes that are buried in the ground in such a way that heating and cooling is transferred from the ground into your house.

But before you rush out to find out more about geothermal heat pumps you should be aware that they are not cheap however they are effective and the prices for these units will come down so it’s quite likely that before long they’ll be within reach of the average suburban household.

Potable water … water that’s clean enough for human consumption … is something that we in the western world take so much for granted. We’ve all been brought up to expect that we can just walk up to the tap and time of the day or night, turn it on and out will come clean water that will quench our thirst.

But what are we going to do when it runs out?

Oh sure … there’s no risk of it ever running out where you are … the dams are almost always full … it rains regularly and there’s plenty of water to go round. Besides, if the rains do fail and the dam levels drop the people in the next county … the next state … they’ll share their water with us so it’s never going to be a problem.

Is that what you really think? Are you sure that’s what will happen if the rains don’t come?

In another part of the western world where it once rained in huge amounts every year global warming has changed the climate and a large city has grown even larger to the point where it’s having an impact on the local climate too.

For nearly five years the rains didn’t come in the quantities that the region need. The rivers began to dry up, the water levels in the dams fell to the point where the large city and the surrounding urban sprawl was looking at the very real risk of running out of water entirely.

When the dam levels fell to just 40 percent and they could measure the remaining water in the dams in terms of very small single digit years some draconian water restrictions were put in place. There was no more washing of cars … watering gardens was severely restricted. Everyone was encouraged to fit water-saving devices to every shower and tap in their homes and the amount of water each household could use in a day for drinking, washing and flushing the toilet was restricted.

As the dry times went on the restrictions became even harsher and there was talk of cutting people’s water supply completely if they couldn’t or wouldn’t live within the limits imposed by the government. People began to turn on their neighbors if they thought that the neighbor was using more water than they should. One person actually died in a fight over the use of water by a neighbor.

And the rains still did not come and the water levels continued to drop. Just a hundred miles up the coast the rain was falling more frequently and dams were brimming with water so the state government decided that they would pipe water south to the city and the urban areas that had no rain.

The outcry from the people who had water was incredible … they simply did not see why they should be made to share their water with those people further south who had hardly any. Fortunately before things got any worse it began to rain in those dry areas and the crisis was averted. Today no one talks about the need to pipe water to the south and no one wants to remember that there was a real possibility that there would have been civil unrest if the government had tried to pipe the water south.

In another part of the same country there’s talk in several towns of capping the population growth simply because the people in those towns feel that their water supply is being stretched to the limit because of continued increases in the population. While no one has yet come to blows over it and there’s no talk of civil disobedience the thought of having to share water with newcomers to the towns is creating a lot of fairly strong debate in the local media.

People who previously took absolutely no interest in local government or in local politics have suddenly become activists in a hope that they can save their water.

Suddenly … in what had once been a very easygoing country … people are trying to protect water that they see as belonging to them alone. Even several of my friends who live there … friends who are always willing to help someone in trouble … have begun to side with those who want to put a cap on the population growth of those towns.

Water is a hot-button and when you press the water button you’re going to find that people have very strong opinions about whether their water should be shared with others or not. If it’s still raining regularly where you live then you won’t hear people declare that: "It’s our water" and you won’t see people getting angry about it or even fight about it but you’ll see it soon enough when the rains stop coming and the dams begin to dry up.

So what are you doing to give you and your family some security when it comes to water that’s suitable for drinking? Are you installing rainwater tanks around the house or are you pretending that water shortages are just not going to happen where you live?

These days there are lots of options for rain water tanks and even if your local area has some ordinance that prevents you from putting a tank up against the side of the house there are tanks that you can bury in your backyard … install under your driveway or even install in your garage.

So now is the time to protect your family’s water supply … before things get nasty and people you once thought were quite decent human beings get their hot button pushed.

A little while ago I wrote a piece about the life or death challenge that our generation is facing if we want to save the planet. Hopefully I made it plain that the only way the planet could survive was if each one of us was totally committed to overcoming the environmental disaster that is just waiting to consume us.

In that article I used some fairly strong language to suggest that if you were only paying lip service to saving the environment … if you felt that all you needed to do was to put out the recycling crate every week with a few things in it then you were just plain faking it.

What I said then needs to be repeated now … if you are not totally committed to being an environmental warrior then you really are doing very little to save the planet. And just in case you thought you were doing so much with that paltry little recycling crate I offered some further suggestions on what you should be doing if you’re serious about being environmentally friendly.

But even those suggests were really just scratching the surface … there are so many more things that you could be doing if you really want to save the planet. And to help you get more serious here are just a few more suggestions.

Packaging

Just take a drive down to your local garbage dump or landfill site and have a look at all the stuff that’s going into landfill these days. A large proportion of it is packaging … packaging for everything from foodstuffs to motorcycles so it’s more than time for you to start thinking about the packaging that comes with what you buy.

Do you bother to look at the supermarket for products that come in the least amount of packaging? Well you should because most food packaging ends up in landfill if it isn’t recycled!

Do you bother to look at the colors and inks that are used on the packaging? Well you should because the chemicals that go into producing those fine colors on the packaging and into the inks all end up leeching out into the landfill and poisoning the environment.

Food items

Do you bother to look for food items that are grown responsibly or do you just grab whatever the marketers have convinced you to think of as being good for you? Look for the green options in everything you buy … not everything you buy has a green alternative but if it has then take it because the makers need to be supported.

Travel

Last time we talked about some of the green options with your car and how you should use it to cut down on your gas consumption and on the amount of emissions that your car pumps out into the atmosphere. This time let me suggest a few more options for you … things like using the cruise control if it’s fitted when you’re out of the city and driving on the highway and keeping your car serviced and the tires inflated correctly for cars that aren’t service begin to use more fuel and tires that are under-inflates create drag and that uses more fuel too.

Clothing

Buy clothing that is environmentally friendly and wherever possible look for clothing made from recycled materials. Be prepared to recycle your own clothes by passing them on to other family members or to agencies that supply clothing to the poor and needy.

Holidays

Yes, even your holidays can be environmentally friendly if only you’re prepared to do a little research and look for places to stay or visit that are eco-friendly. Be prepared to even go so far as to use buses or trains to get to those places rather than taking your car.

Getting to Work

So many of us drive to work but are there more environmentally friendly options available to us? One of my daughters used to drive to work every day till someone suggested that she should use a bike because it would be good exercise.

Not only was it good exercise but she cut 15 minutes off the trip every day because she wasn’t sitting in heavy traffic on the main roads. Instead she could use back roads and cycle ways to travel to work. She got plenty of exercise and she cut all those emissions that her car would have normally pumped into the atmosphere.

I know other people who leave the car at home and walk to work …now there’s a radical option for you!

Become an activist

I’m not suggesting that you do anything crazy here but if you’re serious about doing your part for the environment then it’s time to start writing and emailing your congressman, your senator, your state representative and anyone else who is important. You need to tell them of your concerns and express your disappointment if they’re not supporting environmental issues.

Maybe even get up a petition or join a group of concerned citizens and make a personal call on your representatives.

Above all don’t just sit back and feel good about what you’re doing for the environment. We’re talking about saving the planet here and that’s such a big task that regardless of what you’re doing it’s probably not enough and there will be more that you can do.

However, it’s a start and if every individual realizes that they have to do more then we just might stand a chance of saving the very thing that we totally rely on.

If we look back through the last one hundred to two hundred years of history it’s easy to see that for every generation there has been a challenge … something that the people of the time had to face up to and overcome.

For some generations it was the first or second world wars … for others it was a financial crisis or the challenge of making a new home in a strange land. Today, for us, it’s just about every one of those combined … and more.

Of course there’s war … there’s always a war going on somewhere and even back in biblical times there were wars and rumors of wars. There are financial crises … the current one is just one of many that the world has faced in the last 30 to 40 years. And now we have the ‘more’ … now we have our own special crisis and it involves the environment.

If we don’t overcome this crisis we will all be living in a strange new world as our planet dies around us. But this is more than just a challenge for our generation … that’s a kind of vacuous term that really doesn’t bring the challenges that we face home to us as individuals. Yet that is precisely where the challenge should be focused.

It’s more than a challenge for our generation; it’s a challenge for you as an individual. The current environmental crisis challenges you to do something about helping to save the planet.

It challenges you as an individual and it’s a challenge that you simply can’t escape from by suggesting that it’s someone else’s problem or it’s something that someone else can fix. The only person who can overcome this challenge is YOU so what are YOU doing about it?

Are you taking the challenge seriously? Are you just paying it lip service? Are you ignoring it all together hoping that everyone else can fix the problem for you?

Now you might be surprised to find that I personally think that the person who is paying lip service to the challenge is perhaps far worse than the person who is ignoring it all together. One is making no pretense about being an environmental warrior while the other one is basically just faking it and that’s just plain dishonest.

So which one are you?

If you’re the one who is just faking it then it’s time you stopped pretending and started doing something serious to play your individual role in overcoming the environmental crises. Oh sure, you might be putting stuff in your recycle crate and putting it out to be collected on collection days but that’s just not enough … that’s just faking it.

Instead of just doing a little bit of recycling there is so much more that you could … and must … be doing if you don’t want to end up watching the planet fall apart around your ears.

Recycling is just the start if you seriously want to save the planet … it’s like baby steps. From there you need to move on to looking at every possible way you can save on energy costs around the home … heck you might even have to start doing the dishes by hand to save on the electricity that you would waste if you ran the dishwasher.

You might have to put your washing out in the sun to dry instead of loading it into the dryer and burning heaps of electricity to do what the sun could have done for nothing. Oh it’s raining is it? Well tune into the energy saving options there are for doing things like drying your clothes … you’ll find some of them right here and you’ll also find links here that will take you to other sites that will help you save energy around the home.

And then there’s the little matter of your car. What sort of fuel are you running in it? If there’s a gas station in town that sells an ethanol blend then it’s time you started going there to fill up the tank in your car.

When you’re driving how do you drive? Do you rush from one stop light to the next or do you modulate your driving so that you get a much steadier run? Do you plan your trips so that your not rushing out to the mall and then coming home only to head out again a little while later to run some other errand?

Do you drive when there’s public transport available? Yes, SHOCK HORROR … public transport … buses, trains and even ferries. They are there for you to use and while they may not be as convenient as taking your own car they sure do cut down on harmful emissions and the gas that we would waste if we took our own car.

And even when you do all that you’re really only scratching the surface of being environmentally friendly … but at least you won’t be faking it any more and leaving it all up to other people and that … at least … is a start if YOU want to be serious about saving the planet.

Long gone are the days when ‘Unsafe at Any Speed’ revealed how little regard American car manufacturers had for safety. And even today we tend to think of our home as being our castle … a place where we can be safe from all the dangers of the world. But could it be that our car and our home are perhaps the most dangerous things to our health and wellbeing and even more dangerous for our children?

Sadly, for many of us, it’s an absolute fact that the very place where we seek sanctuary or the car we drive are indeed in the process of killing us … and if they’re not actually killing us then they’re making us extremely unwell. Obviously it’s something that we’re not aware of because if we were we would be doing something about it but it is happening and the people who are responsible know what’s happening and aren’t doing anything about it.

Why should they do anything about it? They’re making plenty of money running legitimate businesses that are operating within the law … even though they are doing so much damage to our health and ultimately to the health of the environment.

So who are these people who are slowly killing us? They’re the people who are filling our new cars with plastics and carpets that give off toxic gases that we can’t see and can’t smell but that do so much damage to us.

They’re also the people who are making furniture, carpets, fittings and even children’s toys that we eagerly buy for our homes and our kids because we know no better. It’s those items, just like the plastics in our cars that give off harmful gases that do so much damage to us.

And all those toxic emissions aren’t just happening while the vehicle or the furniture is new. They go on giving off toxic gases for years and the longer we are exposed to them the worse the damage is to our health.

Not every car and not every piece of furniture is as harmful as the next … it all seems to depend on the manufacturer … although it’s not clear that any manufacturer has reached the point where they are taking positive action to only source raw materials that are going to be low in toxic emissions … some just seem to be doing it by accident rather than intention. But how can we tell what’s harmful and what’s not?

Well it seems that most modern plastics, vinyl products and carpets give off some harmful emissions over their lifetime and without testing we can’t tell which ones are less harmful. Fortunately for us there are bodies out there … such as HealthyStuff.org … that runs tests on these products and go so far as to publish their findings on the Web.

In 2009 of the many vehicles that they tested, the 10 vehicles that gave off the least toxic gases in the passenger compartment were:

• Pontiac G5
• Chevy Coblt
• Toyota Corolla
• Honda Accord
• Nissan Cube Krom
• Honda Insight Hybrid
• Jeep Wrangler
• Toyota Prius
• Honda Civic Hybrid

The ten worst vehicles for toxic emissions were:

• Chevy Aveo
• Mitsubishi Eclipse
• Hyundai Tucson
• Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder
• Volkswagen Jetta
• Chevy Impala
• Volkswagen Beetle
• Volkswagen Eos
• Ford Expedition
• Audi TT Roadster

Chemicals in the home
Many of the chemicals that are found in the fittings in motor vehicles are also found in the furniture and fittings in our homes and even in some of the common consumables that we might use each day as well as in children’s toys, pet care products, and some fabrics used in the clothing we wear.

Sometimes the problematic chemicals form part of a compound in the item that is toxic and sometimes they are included in the toxic items without being part of a compound. Some of the chemicals that you should be concerned about are things like lead … a heavy metal that can be used in paints and plastics for color, as a stabilizer in PVC products and in metal castings for jewelry.

Bromine is another chemical that really cause you a lot of concern. Bromine is usually included in compounds that act as fire-retardants in children’s products and it’s also used in plastics and printed circuit boards as well as thermal insulation foam … the stuff that’s often sprayed in your roof to insulate your house.

PVC plastics are in common use just about everywhere and yet vinyl chloride … a building block of PVC … is a known carcinogen … and if PVC is burnt in a house fire for example it gives off dioxin, yet another well-known carcinogen.

Cadmium is a heavy metal used to stabilize PVC plastics and it can also be used for coatings and pigments on plastic and in paint. Cadmium is a known carcinogen that often produces cancers in the lungs and prostate.

Arsenic is a well-known poison and yet it is in wide-spread use in a variety of areas including wood preservatives, herbicides and insecticides. Sadly arsenic often shows up in children’s toys … probably from its use as a dye in textiles and plastics.

Mercury is often used in a variety of forms and some forms are more toxic than others. The latest use for mercury in what must be its most toxic form is in low-wattage fluorescent globes. If one of these breaks in your house you should evacuate the house immediately and call for help. You might not think that there would be enough mercury in a light globe to kill but there certainly is.

Those are just some of the chemicals that can be found in common fittings and furnishings in your house and in your car. It’s almost impossible to avoid them and the best you can do is limit your exposure to them … otherwise your car and your house could really kill you over a period of time.