It's like that time nobody ever read this blog post

Christine C. Quinn is the second most powerful person in NYC city government, and has some pretty good environmental policy stands. These include electronic recycling programs, using better fuel in city ferries, and stormwater management. In fact, her environmental policy stands are so good that she was sending us snail mail about them every couple of months. On single-side printed, non-recycled paper. In fact, its that fancy, watermarked, 25% cotton paper that you buy to print a thesis on. You would think that if you were going to communicate your environmentally-conscious policy stands to your constituents, you wouldn't print them recklessly on tree pulp and ship them via diesel trucks. Email and CIA brain-chip-transmissions are methods with a much smaller carbon footprint.

• It's like that time Hillary Clinton worked for the Barry Goldwater campaign and was on Wal-Mart's board of directors, and is now some kind of everyman, China-bashing populist.
  
• It's like that time Al Gore jet-setted around the world to give a powerpoint presentation about how humanity's jet-setting lifestyle is contributing to global warming.
• It's like that time Bill Clinton lied about getting blowjobs in the Oval Office and invited That Guy Who Hates America to the White House.

Well, actually it's not nearly as hypocritical as those things. But when we emailed Speaker Quinn about her diluted message, she shocked us by sending us back a detailed reply that included point by point responses. Basically, she said her office is trying to print on both sides of recycled paper. Hopefully she can follow through on this easily achievable goal. But, she did not claim to be "taking it seriously".

But the larger point is that a message to a hot-shot city politician was responded to in a way that shows the message was actually read. Kudos to that! It's a lot better than that time we wrote to Rep. Charles Rangel about supporting Catagory 5 hurricane protection in New Orleans and sending more aid in general to the region. The letter we received back from his office thanked us for agreeing with him that New York should be federally reimbursed for housing Katrina victims.