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The Washington Post again editorialized today in favor of taxing us by the mile driven instead of by the gallon of gas purchased.

Appearing near the Post editorial is a letter from Gerry Rosenthal of Great Falls, Virgina:

Perhaps there should be a tax on every editorial you write. Then you would feel the pain of being charged just for doing your job. I drive to visit my clients regularly, to generate income. The last thing I need is to be penalized for getting out there to support my family.

Your focus is misguided. The auto manufacturers’ lack of ingenuity should be the target, not me.

A further thought. Many people get their copies of the Washington Post by home delivery, which inevitably involves somene driving a car. Leave it to the liberal media to advocate a tax that would hurt its own employees and business. No wonder newspapers are dying.

The Washington Post reported today that

The U.S. House of Representatives has abandoned a plan to make its offices “carbon neutral,” a sign that Congress is wrestling with a pledge to become more green even as it crafts sweeping legislation on climate change.

The promise that the House would effectively reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to zero was a centerpiece of the Green the Capitol program in which the new Democratic leadership sought to use Capitol Hill as a kind of a national demonstration project.

But last week, a spokesman for the House’s chief administrative officer said the chamber’s leadership had dropped an essential part of the plan, the purchase of “carbon offsets” to cancel out emissions from its buildings. Offsets are a controversial commodity that promises that a certain amount of pollution was captured or avoided elsewhere.

“Right now, there is no plan to purchase more offsets,” spokesman Jeff Ventura said. The House paid $89,000 for offsets to cover the last session, in 2007 and 2008.

The decision comes as legislators also struggle with the future of the Capitol Power Plant: Hundreds of demonstrators with Greenpeace, the Rainforest Action Network and other groups will protest tomorrow against the plant’s continued use of coal.

Nancy Pelosi’s message seems to be, “green for thee but not for me.”

As part of the ongoing green attack on our potty habits, The Guardian (UK) has this quote from Allen Hershkowitz, a “senior scientist” with the Natural Resources Defense Council:

“Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age. Making toilet paper from virgin wood is a lot worse than driving Hummers in terms of global warming pollution… People just don’t understand that softness equals ecological destruction.”

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Wallypop, purveyor of goods “supporting a natural lifestyle” is selling cloth toilet wipes. Wallypop says:

Using cloth toilet wipes actually has many advantages. For one, it’s a lot more comfortable and soft on your most delicate body parts. It’s also more economical, uses less paper, and saves you those late-night trips to the store.

Here’s how you use them, according to Wallypop:

Using cloth wipes for urine-only visits to the bathroom is so simple it’s hardly worth mentioning. Go, wipe, and then toss the wipe into whatever container you prefer.

Using cloth wipes for other toilet visits is not any more difficult, but there is a certain ick factor involved. Consider how much waste you’re willing to leave on your children’s diapers or wipes when you toss them in the pail. Use the same standards for yourself. Shake, scrape, swish, or squirt off anything you don’t want in your laundry, and then toss the wipe into the pail or container. (Personally speaking, we just wipe and toss in the pail. Our wipes have minimal staining.)

As Andrew Bolt commented,

Surely it’s time global warming believers marked their houses with some sign, a green pentangle or something, as a warning to visitors to enter at their own risk.

My column at FoxNews.com today…

President Obama wants to pay you to support global warming regulation. What he isn’t saying, however, is that his enticement won’t come close to covering what the regulations will cost you.

You can read the full column at FoxNews.com.

Rose George opined in today’s New York Times that we should recycle urine.

IN the far reaches of Shaanxi Province in northern China, in an apple-producing village named Ganquanfang, I recently visited a house belonging to two cheery primary-school teachers, Zhang Min Shu and his wife, Wu Zhaoxian. Their house wasn’t exceptional — a spacious yard, several rooms — except for the bathroom. There, up a few steps on a tiled platform, sat a toilet unlike any I’d seen. Its pan was divided in two: solid waste went in the back, and the front compartment collected urine. The liquids and solids can, after a decent period of storage and composting, be applied to the fields as pathogen-free, expense-free fertilizer.

From being unsure of wanting a toilet near the house in the first place — which is why the bathroom is at the far end of their courtyard — the couple had become so delighted with it that they regretted not putting it next to the kitchen after all.

What does this have to do with you? Mr. Zhang and Ms. Wu’s weird toilet — known as a “urine diversion,” or NoMix (after a Swedish brand), toilet — may have things to teach us all.

Though George advocates urine diversion toilets, she acknowledges there could be a problem with them:

Then there’s the sitting problem: in most urine-diversion toilets, a man must empty his bladder sitting down. This wouldn’t be a problem in some countries — Germany recently introduced a toilet-seat alarm that admonishes standers to sit — but it has been in others. Professor Jenssen was flummoxed by one participant at a training workshop in Cuba who said firmly, “If a man sits, he is homosexual.”

First, the greens came for our 3.5 gallon flush toilets. Now they want our flush toilets. What’s next? Just hold it?

The New York Times reports this morning that,

… The country’s soft-tissue habit — call it the Charmin effect — has not escaped the notice of environmentalists, who are increasingly making toilet tissue manufacturers the targets of campaigns. Greenpeace on Monday for the first time issued a national guide for American consumers that rates toilet tissue brands on their environmental soundness. With the recession pushing the price for recycled paper down and Americans showing more willingness to repurpose everything from clothing to tires, environmental groups want more people to switch to recycled toilet tissue.

“No forest of any kind should be used to make toilet paper,” said Dr. Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist and waste expert with the Natural Resource Defense Council…

Environmental groups… are hoping that Americans will become as conscious of the environmental effects of their toilet tissue use as they are about light bulbs or other products.

Dr. Hershkowitz is pushing the high-profile groups he consults with, including Major League Baseball, to use only recycled toilet tissue. At the Academy Awards ceremony last Sunday, the gowns were designer originals but the toilet tissue at the Kodak Theater’s restrooms was 100 percent recycled…

Marcal, the oldest recycled-paper maker in the country, emerged from bankruptcy under new management last year with a plan to spend $30 million on what is says will be the first national campaign to advertise a toilet tissue’s environmental friendliness. Marcal’s new chief executive, Tim Spring, said the company had seen intense interest in the new product from chains like Walgreens. The company will introduce the new toilet tissue in April, around Earth Day…

“Our idea is that you don’t have to spend extra money to save the Earth,” [Mr. Spring] said. “And people want to know what happens to the paper they recycle. This will give them closure.”

“Closure” about toilet paper?

A week after Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood floated the idea of taxing drivers by-the-mile-driven rather than by-the-gallon-of-gas-purchased and the White House’s near-immediate denial that such a tax was under consideration, a federal commission has recommended just such as tax.

In a report released today, the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission recommended that,

A federal funding system based on more direct forms of “user pay” charges, in the form of a charge for each mile driven (commonly referred to as a vehicle miles traveled or VMT fee system),
has emerged as the consensus choice for the future…

Commence the transition to a new, more direct user charge system as soon as possible and commit to deploying a comprehensive system by 2020…

Ensure that, once implemented, mileage-based fees and any other charges are set to meet the
designated federal share of national surface transportation investment needs, and index these rates to inflation.

Initiate an extensive public outreach effort to create a broad understanding of the current funding
problem, the proposed solution, the intended method of implementation, and the anticipated
impact on individual system users.

So the government plans on monitoring how much you drive and taxing you on that basis. Note that fuel efficient vehicles won’t save you from the tax.

The Commission’s report is available here.