Featuring a guest appearance by actress, author and activist Aisha Tyler, the “Go Green” preshow will also feature Dave Schlafman’s “Sky is Falling,” the winning short from the Alliance for Climate Protection’s and Current TV’s “:60 Seconds to Save the Earth” Ecospot Contest. Additionally, it will include the Alliance for Climate Protection’s public service announcement “Black Balloons.” “Black Balloons,” with voice-over support from Academy Award-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones, demonstrates easy ways to help reduce global warming while saving money.

Airing “Go Green” on the big screen was a genius move that will reach thousands of viewers who, hopefully, will awaken unto a greener lifestyle and become advocates to our worldly cause. It might even inspire teenagers to think about more than themselves and do something to help the planet that they will inherit. We can only hope.

Many house builders claim that new homes are four times more efficient than older houses. Sure there’s the initial surplus of CO2 to get it built, but the lower emissions will make up for that over the years. That is not so.

The Building and Social Housing Foundation (BSHF) and The Empty Homes Agency of England did a study that compared the CO2 given off in building new homes and creating new homes through refurbishing old properties. The key findings are:

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from new homes fall into two distinct sources: “embodied” CO2 given off during the house building process, and “operational” CO2 given off from normal energy use in the house once it is occupied.

Reusing empty homes could make an initial saving of 35 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per property by removing the need for the energy locked into new building materials and construction. Refurbished old homes have lower embodied CO2 and therefore a distinct head start over new homes.

Well-insulated new homes eventually make up for their high embodied energy costs through lower operational CO2 but it takes several decades. This means there almost no difference in the average emissions of new compared with refurbished housing for about 50 years.

Fifty years was not intended to represent the expected lifespan of the house but to represent the likely period before a major refurbishment might be expected. This would provide the next opportunity after initial development in which the environmental performance of the house could be reconsidered and changed.

So if there is no structural damage or need to rebuild, consider refurbishing your house until the next 50 years is up. It’ll save you money and a large CO2 footprint.

Organic food [and other agriculture, like cotton] is produced by farmers who emphasize the use of renewable resources and the conservation of soil and water to enhance environmental quality for future generations.  Organic meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy products come from animals that are given no antibiotics or growth hormones.  Organic food is produced without using most conventional pesticides; fertilizers made with synthetic ingredients or sewage sludge; bioengineering; or ionizing radiation.  Before a product can be labeled “organic,” a Government-approved certifier inspects the farm where the food is grown to make sure the farmer is following all the rules necessary to meet USDA organic standards.  Companies that handle or process organic food before it gets to your local supermarket or restaurant must be certified, too.

What the labels means:

100% Organic: Made with 100% organic ingredients

Organic: Made with at least 95% organic ingredients

Made With Organic Ingredients: Made with a minimum of 70% organic ingredients with strict restrictions on the remaining 30% including no GMOs (genetically modified organisms)

Products with less than 70% organic ingredients may list organically produced ingredients on the side panel of the package, but may not make any organic claims on the front of the package.

Beware, natural and organic are not interchangeable.  Other claims, such as free-range, hormone-free, and natural, can still appear on food labels.  However, don’t confuse these terms with “organic.”  Only food labeled “organic” has been certified as meeting USDA organic standards.

The term “free range” is only regulated for live poultry. The government only requires that outdoor access be made available for ‘an undetermined period each day. So five minutes or an hour? No one knows but the farmers. And what about cows and pigs? There are no regulations for them at all. Anyone can put that phrase on their packages.

Hormone-free only means that cows were not treated with bovine somatotropin, a bovine growth hormone used to make cows produce more milk.

The term “natural” means that well, it’s natural. Cotton is natural. Just because most of it’s made with gallons of fertilizers doesn’t make it unnatural. It’s the “organic” that you want.

Is it really? Have you ever considered helping the environment by not buying things? Sure your old sheets weren’t organic but they were already there and still functional. Are they any better now that they’re in a landfill somewhere while resources that didn’t need to be used were used to make the new bamboo sheets you just purchased? And don’t forget the carbon footprint they left to get to your bed. It’s very wasteful to toss out your old clothes and replace them with organics when you didn’t need new clothes at all. The only things worth replacing outright in your home are your fridge and furnace, and maybe your toilet and shower head for water conservation. But you don’t need new hemp curtains when the old ones work just fine.

When renowned environmentalist Paul Hawken is asked to comment on the new green consumer, he says, dryly, “The phrase itself is an oxymoron. Really going green,” He says, “means having less. It does mean less. Everyone is saying, ‘You don’t have to change your lifestyle.’ Well, yes, actually, you do.”

If you absolutely need it, sure, get the organic brand. But, as Chip Giller of Grist says, “We’re not going to buy our way out of this.” The greenest products are the ones you don’t buy.

The magic goo is anatase titanium dioxide, a widely used pigment. Sunlight reacts with the coating to break apart organic molecules like dyes, turning them into carbon dioxide and water at room temperature. How cool is that?

The scientist coated some silk and wool with it, then stained both treated fabrics and non-treated fabrics with red wine and exposed them to simulated sunlight.

After 20 hours, the stains on the treated fabrics were almost completely gone, while the stains on conventional fabrics looked virtually the same.

When can we expect this magnificent marvel? “We are currently collaborating with a famous textile company for doing mill-trials,” said study co-author Wing Sze. “We believe it won’t be long before the product appears on the market.” They believe that clothes with self-cleaning properties will become a standard feature of future textiles. I’m willing to believe them too.

Most of the solvents used in the paint industry are classified VOCs. By definition, a VOC is any compound of carbon (excluding carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, carbonic acid, metallic carbides or carbonates, and ammonium carbonate) which participates in atmospheric photochemical reactions. VOCs react with nitrous oxides in the air to create ground level ozone (smog). And everyone knows how long it takes for the paint smell to leave a house. Forever.

Luckily, Mythic^TM paints meet and exceed the most stringent environmental and performance testing standards including those by Green Seal® and Master Painters Institute.

The paint is non-toxic, ultra low odor and provides the durability and coverage you expect from a premium paint without the off-gassing VOC’s and cancer-causing toxins that emit years after drying. You will also find no lead, mercury, formaldehyde, formaldehyde precursors, crystalline silica or other known toxic materials or suspected carcinogens in their paints.

They offer 1232 standard palette colors and can also match virtually any other company’s color.

Sure some of it comes from bubbling springs way up on some mountain, but more than 25 percent of it comes from a municipal supply. They dress it up, make it smell nice and then sell it to us for a price higher per gallon than gasoline. The bottlers aren’t required to tell us that it’s glorified tap water, so they don’t.

They also don’t have to let consumers know if their product becomes contaminated even though recalls happen. “Between 1990 and 2007, this happened about 100 times,” says Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California. Some of the reasons for recall: contamination with mold, benzene, coliform, microbes, and even crickets. Ew.

Bottled water is hardly regulated for safety. The EPA regulates tap water, while the FDA oversees bottled. Yet FDA doesn’t regulate water packaged and sold within the same state, leaving some 60 to 70 percent of bottled water, free of FDA regulation. That leaves testing to be done by states themselves, but the NRDC found that they often don’t have enough resources to oversee bottled water, and in some cases lack even one full-time person for an entire state.

So what if you make sure and buy really clean spring water in a bottle, is it safe then? That depends on you. Most bottled water comes in polyethylene terephthalate bottles which are generally safe. But when stored in hot or warm temperatures (like your car), the plastic may leach chemicals into the water. Antimony is a potentially toxic material used in making PET. Last year, scientists in Germany found that the longer a bottle of water sits around (in a store, in your home), the more antimony it develops. High concentrations of antimony can cause nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. I just want some water!

Oh, and let’s not forget the environmental impact here. Virgin petroleum is used to make PET, and the more bottles we use, the more virgin petroleum will be needed to create new bottles. Fossil fuels are burned to fill the bottles and distribute them. And let me point out that it’s not just bottled water, but juices, soda and other beverages packed in plastic that add to this waste.

Then there’s the waste of the bottles themselves. Less than 20% of them get recycled. The rest are just sitting around in landfills, where they will wait for thousands of years to decompose.

So what’s a person to do? Filter your tap if you want that clean taste and carry it around in a stainless steel bottle (which can be down right neat). If you must have bottled, look for brands that are NSF certified or belong to IBWA, and store in in a cool place. And don’t forget to recycle, not reuse.

There are plenty of products that say “Made With Natural Plant Extracts!” on the label so we assume it’s better than the rest because after all, Mother Nature loves us. The plant extracts are in there alright, and they would be great for your skin, except so are a whole mess of 15 syllabic chemicals that came out of a laboratory, not the earth. Most of these chemicals do more harm than good. They can irritate your skin, affect your central nervous system or increase your risk for breast cancer. That’s hardly conducive to gorgeous skin.

Finding all natural skin care products is fairly hard to do in your local drug store, but they’re just a click away. The people at Pangea Organics are so dedicated to bringing you the best for your body and the earth that their products are synthetic free and come in seed embedded boxes (basil or amaranth) that you can plant in your garden. Cargo has gotten in on the action and has wildflower seeds in their Plant Love lipstick boxes as well as having the lipstick tubes be made entirely out of corn. Plus, they’re donating two dollars from the sale of every shade to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. For your make up needs, Afterglow Cosmetics brings you a natural blend of pure mineral make-up, organic lipsticks and organic liners containing no bismuth oxychloride, parabens, cornstarch or talc, no fd&c or lake dyes, petro-chemicals and no mineral oil.

An ingenious concept by Nikola Knezevic may give us a laptop with complete power independence. The notebook comes with two batteries, one smaller internal one and a larger one that is part of a detachable solar panel. You can detach the panel to recharge the big battery while running the notebook off of the smaller battery. When you get low, just pop the panel back on. The smaller battery is also recharged when the the solar panel is connected.

The notebook is also equipped with satellite link, GPS, internet access and satellite telephone making it a universal tool to connect and communicate from literally anywhere in the world.

Consider the bicycle-push lawnmower hybrid. It’s all the eco-friendliness of a push lawnmower powered by the superior strength of legs over arms. How fun is that! There are several patents out there, but just about anyone can make their own. So go out there and get some exercise and some yard work done at the same time. And have fun!