Wow! We meant to post much sooner than today, but our Internet was put out of commission by the Snowpocalypse, remnants piled up in 2-foot-high dunes all around Baltimore. All we could do was sit around and prepare for the inevitable Yeti attacks - the naked fear present in most of that week’s weather forecasts suggested they were on the way. But now our connection to the rest of the world is restored, so we thought we’d gather a few tips on how to deal with snow cleanly and greenly (assuming greenly is even a word).

1. Shoveling might be a pain in the ass, and back, and shoulders, and knees, but it’s the most environmentally sound way of moving snow around. A close second, however, is the Wovel, a snow shovel on a wheel that utilizes your body weight to push snow without much energy expenditure. It’s won all sorts of green awards for its design, which is equal parts shovel and olde-tymey bicycle, and it costs less than a snow blower. So if you absolutely need to update your hardware, try one out.

2. Use sand or kitty litter for tire traction instead of salt; salty runoff is bad for the water table. Relatedly, some cities in upstate New York are mixing recycled glass in with their salt loads to fix this problem, and found that the mixture is both less expensive and more potent than salt alone. The glass, ground fine enough to pose no danger to car tires, bounces enough sunlight around to melt snow and ice quickly. We’re hoping Baltimore catches wind of this idea, since we’re already used to seeing glass in the street and wouldn’t put up much resistance to it finally doing us some good.

3. If you’re just a snow blower kind of person, Toro makes an electric snow blower that’s cleaner, quieter, and doesn’t require as much engine maintenance as a conventional model. It’s also lighter, which is an obvious benefit - our backs were sore enough after digging cars out.

4. Do nothing, which uses no energy, gives off no emissions (excusing the occasional blast of methane), and might keep you from feeling like an idiot if we end up getting even more snow this week. Curse you, Ullr!

Anyway, that should be enough to get our Mid-Atlantic readers started. Godspeed, and steer clear of Yetis.

We’ve been looking for ethanol news all afternoon, but unfortunately all we can turn up are cranky blog entries about corn being yanked from the mouths of starving orphans and ethanol is a waste of time and money and other Republican hand-waving. Same with electric cars, only that topic brings out the whiners who want their glorious electropia now now now and are pissed off that a magic wand hasn’t been waved over the energy grid yet. It’s maddening. So we decided to not completely bum ourselves out and find something fun to post on the blog instead, and it just so happens that we found a fun little cartoon about how ethanol is actually made. Bonus points for the use of clip art and ubiquitous 1950s instructional video music. Click the Car to watch it, and we’ll see you next week when, hopefully, there will be something besides meaningless conjecture on the Internet.

Stay tuned to Corn Car for an exclusive interview with Baltimore DIY Squad about their solar oven, and other sustainability efforts - we’ll be talking with them on Wednesday and posting soon afterwards. In the meantime, here’s a link they sent us to the “Sport” Solar Oven. It works like a crock pot and, of course, cooks using the power of our mother star.

Also, just for fun, here’s a cartoon illustrating how ethanol is made.