Spurred by the torrential rainstorms that have recently plagued Indiana and the number of responses we've received from Angie's List members concerning our Green Living Issue — both positive and negative — I’ve been giving global warming some thought…

I’ve decided that, regardless of which side of the global warming camp you’re on, or if you’re camping at all, there should be no denying that something is causing the earth’s weather patterns to go absolutely haywire. All you need to do is turn on the news for five minutes and you’re inundated with stories of natural disasters sweeping their way across the globe. Or worse, you’re living those stories.

From flooding of apocalyptic proportions to tornadoes, cyclones and earthquakes, the start of Summer ’08 has been, at best, a rocky one. And, whether you’re sitting resolutely in your 5,000 square foot home, with all the lights on and the A/C pumping full blast while your F-450 sits idling in the driveway, or if you’re sweating it out in your newly LEED-certified condo, toting reusable grocery bags and declaring every day ‘national bike-to-work-day,’ chances are you’re going to be affected by the global warming debate as everyone reacts to it in their own way. (Nonbeliever – your truck is going to require a new diet of biodiesel sometime in the near future. And, for the environmentalist — Puma just released a new bike, the Stealth Visibility, for your daily commute. It glows in the dark! You can check the List for a highly rated local bicycle store where you can get yours.)

The thing is, while there is a handful of people who point to the roller coaster pattern of climate change that has occurred over the past thousand years or so, the majority of people now believe that our daily activities are playing a hand in our dramatically changing climate. Among those people are leaders of major corporations, whose decisions to change their practices are going to ultimately affect you. Even if they don’t believe we have anything to do with the declining polar bear population, they're rethinking their business practices anyway due to factors like heightened fuel prices and the need to 'hop on the green bandwagon' to draw in environmentally conscious clients.

So, what this seems to ultimately mean for the consumer is that we’re faced with a whole new array of product choices and responsibilities (e.g. your new glow-in-the-dark bike and another pump at the gas station). But we’re also faced with a new array of marketing tactics to draw in green-minded buyers. By throwing a few buzz words into product advertisements, some companies are trying to give the consumer a false sense of responsible decision making (it’s called greenwashing). My local café can tout their green practices they want, but when it’s 85 degrees outside and I have to wear a parka to be comfortable sitting inside with the A/C on, something is amiss — particularly when you take into account the fact that buildings are responsible for 38% of the greenhouse gases being absorbed by our earth’s atmosphere.

I guess what this means, for me anyway, is that it’s not enough to buy a drink because of its cool new environmentally friendly design — I have to find out what the production process was that went into making that little hand-friendly bottle. If it required ten extra steps of carbon-emitting production, the fact that it uses five-percent less plastic seems to be a moot point.