Even though I don’t live in New York, somehow the NYTimes has found out about my habit (just occasional, I swear) of leaving the air conditioner on when I’m out so I can come back to a cool apartment. That’s one of the compensations of renting: on the dark side, you pay someone else instead of yourself to live in a neglectfully-run, dehumanizing filing cabinet for human beings; but on the bright side, utilities are included!

When the Green revolution comes, of course, we’re all going to have to pull our own weight and bear the full costs of our wasteful, carbon-spewing, nature-despoiling, more-or-less profligate resource usage. After all, negative externalities don’t fix themselves — that’s what makes them externalities, after all. It may not be exactly responsible of me, but I plan to keep enjoying it while it lasts.