Green Guilt Trip

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The government and the greenies are afraid of making you feel guilty. Not me. And a whole lot of sources back me up.

Plastic: You're not throwing away plastic bags, genius — you're throwing away oil. In energy alone, recycling a ton of plastic bags saves 11 barrels of oil. Which means that Californians, by tossing away 19 billion plastic bags last year — all of them blowing across my lane of the freeway — wasted about 4.5 million barrels of oil. And those darling little plastic water bottles you tossed — 18 million barrels of oil to make them. What, did you think the Sparkletts fairy whisked them all away?

Paper: The lungs you ruin may be your own. A mature tree eats 13 pounds of carbon dioxide every year, so every time you don't recycle a huge stack of envelopes and junk mail and wrapping paper and newspapers, you're murdering a tree that could have saved you. You could heat your house for six months on the energy saved from recycling a ton of paper.

Aluminum cans: Too lazy to shuffle to the recycling bin? The energy you waste by throwing away a single soda can would run your TV for three hours. Throwing away an empty six-pack is like throwing away nearly a $3.50 gallon of gasoline. We Americans toss away enough aluminum cans in a year to rebuild every commercial airliner in America. Good work, cola-for-brains.

Et ceteras:

• You throw away three pounds of trash every day; two pounds of that could be recycled, unless you like the idea of living next to Landfill World

• You're adding 10% or 20% to your electric bill and sucking coal and oil by keeping energy vampires plugged in: phone chargers, TVs and printers.

• Pour away a gallon of motor oil instead of recycling it, and you're dumping enough energy to dry your hair for 216 days or to watch 60 Super Bowls.We've come to the end of this guilt trip; thanks for ride-sharing.