Just in Time for Christmas: Green Dimes & Red-Hot Car Sharing

I've discovered that this blog has become a clearing house for my friends' environmental news. They send me the articles and I post them here. It's a pretty sweet deal ... they spread the word on cool environmental tidbits, and I don't have to come up with a topic for that week's blog! If you have any articles you'd like me to feature, please post them in the comments section.

* General Motors has put together a futuristic green concept car called the "Hummer O2." Never mind that it looks nothing like an actual Hummer ... or that the current H2 gets around 10 miles to the gallon of gas ... GM thinks this proves they care about being environmentally friendly. Right.

* It takes the equivalent of 100 million trees to create the paper to print a year's worth of America's junk mail, but a new organization is pledging to cut down drastically on your junk mail for about $3 a month. It's called Green Dimes, and I don't know if it works, but it's worth checking out!

* According to the Washington Post, car sharing is catching on fast:

[November 29th], one of the two major car-sharing companies that operate in the Washington region, Zipcar, announced a $25 million investment that will allow it to possibly double the 350 vehicles it already puts on area streets.

In June, Zipcar's rival, District-based Flexcar, announced a major investment by a company started by AOL co-founder Steve Case. That could set up the Washington area -- one of only two major markets where the two companies compete -- as a testing ground to see just how far car sharing can go in reducing congestion, pollution and parking woes.

"Some of the highest adoption neighborhoods in the country are in D.C.," said Scott Griffith, chief executive of Zipcar, based in Cambridge, Mass. He said that in the Dupont Circle and Capitol Hill neighborhoods, where parking can be difficult to find, more than 10 percent of residents older than 21 use the service.