Monday morning, I stood at the bus stop outside an Exxon station in a drizzling rain, thinking about Earth Day. Car after car rolled past, empty save for a driver, motoring in to work without a care in the world.

I'm sliding dangerously toward believing that we're pretty much screwed when it comes to curbing U.S. consumption of fossil fuels and emissions of greenhouse gases. I'm pretty sure we won't change our behavior.

Take this Earth Day. Oil is selling for $118 a barrel, gasoline is hanging out at around $3.50 a gallon, the economy is slumping, millions are losing their homes to foreclosure, and on and on, and Americans' habits aren't budging.

I'm not a fatalist, and maybe it's just years and years of inaction that's leaving me cynical. But I don't think we have it in us to really make the kinds of massive, sweeping changes necessary to curtail some of the national habits most linked to climate change.

This isn't dogma. I'm not making a binding decision to write off the environment. (Though I did notice that the long-sought goal of new CAFE standards -- an issue I worked on during the Clinton administration -- were finally announced by the Bush administration IN THE FINAL EARTH DAY OF ITS TWO TERMS, and the environment community said, "Eh.") This is rather a personal decision to release my personal investment in the possibility that America and its government will do this job.

It's somewhat like being let down by a sports team so often that you just have to say to yourself, "I expect them to lose, and if they win, I'll be pleasantly surprised." I expect us to keep on doing nothing about climate change, and if we do something about climate change, I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Lately, anyhow, I've become more interested in water issues. Potable water just about drives me crazy. When I see potable water being wasted, hosed onto a sidewalk, run (by my children, unfortunately) for no reason into the sink, I see red. People are suffering today because of western irresponsibility about climate change, this I know. But every single day, people are getting sick and dying for lack of clean, drinkable water. For some reason, I feel like individual decisions about water add up more effectively than individual decisions about energy. Maybe it was my Earth Hour experience that started this all off.

Tomorrow, I'll explain (in what I hope won't be too humorous a post) my plan to grow grass without using water from the tap.
Photo Courtesy of Flickr user Alex Kess and used under a Creative Commons license