Sierra Club - The Green Life

Daily Roundup Volkswagen's new Jetta TDI beat out all the others to be crowned the 2009 Green Car of the Year... A Wal-Mart store in Anchorage, Alaska is now selling wild salmon from Bristol Bay... The price of crude oil closed below $50 per barrel for the first time in more than three years.

Cocaine's Environmental Impact There's new weapon in the war on drugs: eco-guilt. Every gram of cocaine snorted destroys four square meters of rainforest, Francisco Santos Calderon, Colombia's vice president, told British police officers on Wednesday. Santos launched the "Shared Responsibility" campaign in London in May. John P. Walters, the United States' "drug czar," said in 2002 that Columbia has lost rougly 3 million acres of rainforest, and cocaine processors release more than 370,000 tons of chemicals into the fragile ecosystem every year. Since illegal growers are unlikely to switch to organic, shade-grown, fairly-traded cocaine, it's fair to say that blow is no friend of the earth.

Climate-Change Extravaganzas Underway At the Governor's Global Summit, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is flexing his environmental muscles along with governors from four other states to host more than 800 attendees at the Beverly Hills Hilton. And it'll open with a video in which Barack Obama states that recent economic turmoil won't take greenhouse-gas issues off his agenda.

Green Your Thanksgiving: Leave No Trace After tripping on tryptophan and overloading on carbs, the last thing you want to deal with after a hefty Thanksgiving dinner is leftovers. This year, ask guests to bring their own Tupperware containers to reduce the use of tinfoil and save space in your fridge. Or find a local soup kitchen or shelter that will take prepared foods.

Daily Roundup The EU is hoping to raise awareness about the effect of declining bee populations on the world's food supply. If things keep going the way they are, these pollinators may not be back again.

Chime In For Change President-elect Barack Obama wants to hear from you. The Obama-Biden Transition team will use the Web site Change.gov to solicit ideas and feedback as they prepare for White House. So far, environmental concerns are high on the agenda: Obama has pledged to invest $150 billion in green technology and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent by 2050. What do you think Obama should do to protect the environment? Share your comments at Change.gov.

Stephen Colbert Takes on Big Oil's Funny Business of Greenwashing The fake-news titan's typically tounge-in-cheek video segment says it all.