If you’re a frequent reader of this site, you might be one of those people that nitpicks the environmental impact of most everything - and that’s a good thing.   So here’s a new one you may have already thought of: is it an environmental waste that we change our car’s oil every 3,000 miles?  Can we go longer than that?

Well, EarthTalk on MSNBC’s green website has an answer for us, and it’s pretty simple.   Jiffy Lube wants more of your money, and wants to see you more often.   But your car’s manual will probably tell you that you don’t really need to change your oil until you’ve hit 5,000 or 7,000 miles.   The writers of EarthTalk tell us this, by quoting another website, effectively making this blog post like twelth-party information:

According to the automotive website Edmunds.com, the answer depends more on driving patterns than anything else. Those who rarely drive more than 10 miles at a time (which doesn’t get the oil hot enough to boil off moisture condensation) or who start their car frequently when the oil isn’t hot (when most engine wear occurs) should change their oil more often at least twice a year, even if that’s every 1,000 miles, according to Edmunds. But commuters who drive more than 20 miles a day on mostly flat freeway can go as far as their owner’s manual recommends, if not longer, between changes. As a car ages, more frequent changes might be in order, but that’s for a qualified mechanic to decide on a case-by-case basis.

So there we have it…if you’re driving like most of us, where the commute to work is a little bit of a haul, you can hold off on getting your oil changed.

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Lexus is trying to make the luxury car even more luxuriouserish by going hybrid, according to treehugger.com and Reuters news.   The managing officer of Toyota, which owns Lexus, “intends to introduce hybrid versions of its Lexus luxury vehicles as early as possible,” says the news report.   He went on to say that the firm is “considering making the Lexus lineup hybrid-only.”

This is certainly great news for the future of green cars, if Lexus follows through.   But what really caught my eye when looking into this story was this quote from treehugger:

The cause of this change of strategy is probably higher fuel costs (even if they went down a bit lately) and, especially, the fact that the global sales of Lexus fell 9% on the year to 310,000 in the January-August period.

That obviously makes sense, but did Lexus really sell only 310,000 cars in half a year?  I think I saw 310,000 Lexus ads in that timeframe.   Literally.   And I mean that in the Joe Biden sense of the word, which of course means not literally at all.

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The Associated Press via MSNBC (or is it the other way around?) announced yesterday the results of the first ever carbon cap-and-trade auction in the United States, which took place last Thursday, and raised $38.5 million.   The byline of the article is Albany, New York, so I’m going to go ahead and say that’s where the auction took place.

The money raised will be filtered back to the ten states that took part in the auction, to be spent on renewable energies and technologies.   Financially speaking, the auction was a success, as

Energy, financial and environmental interests paid $3.07 per allotted ton of emissions, about 65 percent more than the minimum set price of $1.86.

Though this is the very first auction of its type in the United States, but there are plans to make these quarterly events, the next of which is to be held December 17.  I’m almost positive there was a better way to word that last clause, but I’m going to just let it go.

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American Idol’s season finale, which appears to be happening on May 20 and May 21 (don’t know how a finale can be two separate shows, but whatever), will be a carbon-neutral event.   This is a part of FOX’s campaign to be a network with no carbon footprint by 2010.  FOX News/pollution joke goes here.   Anyhow, from the American Idol website:

In partnership with the LADWP [Los Angeles Department of Water and Power], FOX secured renewable energy for the Nokia Theatre L.A. LIVE for the duration of the American Idol production. The power will be provided by LADWP’s “Green Power for a Green LA Program,” and sources will include a combination of solar energy, wind energy and hydropower.

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