Early on in our planning, we were concerned about whose car we're going to be using. It was between my 2006 Hyundai Sonata and Joey's 2001 Nissan XTerra... for some reason, we never really gave much thought to Sarah's car. Sorry, Sarah. 
There were intelligent arguments coming from both sides of the discussion. Joey's car had much more space for storage, sleeping, and essentially living out of for a summer, but only gives us 20 miles per gallon of gasoline. That's on the highway, with a minimal amount of extra weight. It will be driven down somewhat with the addition of our weight and all the stuff we're bringing along.
My car, on the other hand, offers a solid 30 mpg highway, but offers considerably less in terms of storage space. And as we watched the price of gasoline sink lower, and lower, and lower, we decided that we'd go for the XTerra and pay the price of extra fuel.
But thinking on a less personal level, this means we're burning more fuel, creating more pollution and, maybe worst of all, giving more money to the fat cats at the oil companies. Man, I hate those fat cats.
So this is something to come to terms with. Will we be able to enjoy the trip to its fullest extent, knowing full well that we're contributing to the gradual destruction of our natural environs in doing so? Would I be able to sleep better at night if we were driving something with slightly better fuel mileage, or would that just be a lesser degree of the same evil? What would Kant say? There's no way this trip would fly with him, if he had known about global warming back in the late 1700s.
See, on occasion, I find karma to be a very real thing in this world. And I would hate for anything terrible, untimely, or unfrtunate in any way to befall us during our trip, simply because we decided to go pedal to the metal and not pay any mind to how we were affecting the environment.
This, my friends, is something for us to consider and act upon. From simple things like keeping our recycling separate from our trash, to more intense things having our car's emissions offset, we'll be looking into a handful of ways that we can be friendly to the world around us.

-Tom Stanley

Al Gore
2/1/2009 03:17:05 am

You fucking hypocrites.

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barak obama
2/2/2009 05:19:53 am

gentlemen,

did you not get the democratic party memo? We have realized now that everyone is losing money we can bash the republicans for lack of economic regulation to make our side look better. we no longer need to focus on the environment, as everyone just stopped caring all of the sudden...

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