Ecological Intelligence

I am reading a book "Ecological Intelligence." The fellow talks about Life Cycle Assessment. LCA is the study of the affect on the ecology to manufacture an item, the manufacture of each part that makes up the item, the transportation of the completed item plus each part and the manufacture of the material that goes into each item and each part. The result is nothing is "green" just in that direction. The author claims there is a fundamental disconnect between what we do and how it matters.

Some examples:

The Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research documents warming that leads mountain slopes below 5,000 feet to get 20 percent less snow that was true in earlier decades. Too little snowfall means that resorts have to manufacture the stuff, using machines that require enormous amounts of energy---and so worsen climate heating. Yet even in balmy weather, come the season skiers blithely expect to hit the slopes n matter what. So resorts concoct the man-made fluff with energy-hungry snow making equipment.

Industrial ecologists did a careful analysis of a green housing project in Vienna where residents gave up cars and used the money saved by not building garages to build solar energy collectors and the like. When it came to energy use and getting around, these households were far lower in their carbon emissions than conventional households. But when it came to everything else---food, travels beyond Vienna, and the overall basket of goods they bought---these households were no better than any others.

Common ingredients in sunscreen turn to prime the growth of a virus in the algae that live inside coral reefs. Researchers estimate between 4,000 and 6,000 metric tons of sunscreen wash off swimmers each year worldwide, threatening to turn about 10 percent of coral reefs into bleached skeletons. The dangers are greatest, of course, where the most swimmers are drawn to the beauty of these reefs.