Michael Prager

I knew a guy once who smoked cigars in self-satisfaction for years, but felt he had to give it up when stogies became became the latest fad — it was anathema to him to be seen as going along with a fad. I thought of that again yesterday, when a pal suggested he might not want a Prius because it has become a Yuppie status symbol.

But as I've noted before, the Prius works, strictly at the level of utility, even if it also has become a Yuppie symbol. I know I'm burning less fossil fuel by getting 45 mph, even if some people might think I'm a status seeker.

As the previous post attests, I love to make fun of advertisers and marketers.

On my way back from visiting my grandmother yesterday, I spied a sign with an unexpected come-on at a used-car lot:

"Why overpay elsewhere"

I can't be the only one whose internal voice completes the question with, "... when you can overpay here?" It's not just me, right?

A strong tenet of the green lifestyle is to "buy local," since even if, say, you are staunchly committed to organic produce — because you understand the long-term danger to agriculture of heavy pesticide use, and you understand that many fertilizers are made with petrochemicals — you are undercutting your principles if the organic produce you buy is flown in from Chile or trucked in from California.

Also from the print press today is William Yardley's "Juneau Journal" in the Times, which details the crisis actions the Alaskan capital has taken to lower its electrical consumption.

The crisis was brought on not by global climate change but by a different natural devastator: An avalanche felled some utility towers that carried hydroelectric power to the city. That power cost 11 cents per kilowatt hour, while the diesel-fired power that replaced it costs 53 cents.

Beth Daley, the Globe's environmental writer, has a terrifically informative story today whose headline encapsulates it well: "Not as green as they claim to be." 

I posted a while back that John McCain was dead to me, for his panderific suggestion that the federal gasoline tax be suspended for the summer to give drivers a break. I thought it a dumb idea (still do), but worse, it showed me Mr. Straight Talk would be willing to throw anything under the Straight Talk Express if he would gain a few votes for doing it.

Car services are a bit beyond my means, or perhaps I should say, I have no specific idea what car services cost because I’ve always assumed they are beyond my means. Which, I’m sure, they are. But enough about me.

Planettran has put the eco-twist on car service by putting into service a fleet of Priuses to ferry the swells around town.

When I embarked on my piecemeal reprise and commentary on "Cradle to Cradle," the important 2002 book by Michael Braungart and William McDonough, one of my background assumptions was that I would cruise through the book in order. But I ran across something last night that made me want to jump ahead.