"We have turned out the lights in the studio," NBC's Bob Costas told viewers
of Sunday's Dallas Cowboys-Philadelphia Eagles game, "to kick off a week
that will include more than 150 hours of programming designed to raise
awareness about environmental issues." Discerning viewers with eyes keen
enough to pierce the sanctimonious glare of Costas' candlelit silhouette may
have noticed that the stadium's klieg lights still shone brightly.
On a typical game day, a large football stadium burns about 65,000 kilowatt
hours of electricity and 35,000 cubic feet of natural gas. The cars driving
to the game spew about 200 metric tons of CO2 (and that assumes nobody's
driving SUVs or RVs, which is like assuming tailgaters are eating only
sushi). There's also the electricity used to broadcast the game and to watch
it. But thank goodness Costas turned off the studio lights for a minute or
two.
NBC's "Green Week" continued apace (well after this writing). Morbidly obese
contestants on "The Biggest Loser" lugged piles of recyclable cans up ramps
and into enormous collection bins. Of course, the cans were delivered to the
stunt by diesel truck. So a lot of energy - and sweat! - that could have
been used toward fermenting homebrew tofu, or whatever energy is supposed to
be used for, was wasted on viewer schadenfreude. The winners of the
challenge each received a hybrid SUV. Alas, one of the winners didn't own a
car to begin with, so the net result was one more car on the road and a
little more CO2 in the air.
On "Days of Our Lives," a fictional couple had a fictionally "green"
wedding.
The cast of the "Today" show burned massive amounts of jet fuel sending its
hosts to the corners of the globe, leaving a "carbon footprint" larger than
those left near the recycle bin on "The Biggest Loser."
I could go on, but you've seen the tyranny of Green even if you've never
turned on NBC. Green is everywhere. Every magazine feels compelled to sell
some sliced tree-meat in a special "green issue," but they feel so guilty
about it, they ditch their glossy paper for pulp that gives it the feel of a
hemp-commune newsletter that doubles as sustainable toilet paper. Food
magazines have replaced "delicious" with "sustainable" as the highest
praise. "Green is the new black" according to fashion writers who at least
think certain cliches never go out of style.
Now, the predictable response to my caterwauling is that I just don't get
it. Of course, Bob Costas' Dickensian studio lighting is just so much
symbolism. But, they respond, NBC is "raising consciousness" and promoting
"awareness." We've heard this tone before, perhaps starting in high school,
when we were told, "If we all work together, we can make this the best
yearbook ever!"
And that's why, on top of all the other reasons, Green Week - and the Green
Millennium it hopes to usher in - is so annoying. It plays us all for
suckers. First of all, you have enormously rich people at fantastically
wealthy corporations seeking grace on the cheap with a few symbolic gestures
that come at absolutely no cost, and often considerable profit.
You do know that the parent company of NBC is General Electric, right? You
do know that for GE, green is first and foremost the color of money, right?
As Tim Carney explains in vivid detail in his wonderful book, "The Big
Ripoff," GE's "ecomagination" campaign is simultaneously a way to brand
itself as a "progressive" company and a means of shaking the money tree -
the most sustainable planting of them all - growing in Congress' backyard.
When the global company launched the ecomagination campaign, guess where it
held the launch party? Its D.C. lobbying office, of course.
While sipping from wine made at a solar-powered winery, the head of GE,
Jeffrey Immelt, proclaimed, "Industry cannot solve the problems of the world
alone. We need to work in concert with government." Translation: The King
Kong of the corporate world needs tax breaks, subsidies and favorable
regulations in order to make green technology profitable. Indeed, GE has
nearly cornered the market on the solar panels necessary to implement
Kyoto-style reforms. Global warming hysteria is good for its bottom line.
Liberals and environmentalists love to whine about special breaks for
corporations, and they work themselves into paroxysms of paranoia about how
big corporations propagandize against action on climate change. The reality
is exactly the opposite. GE, DuPont, British Petroleum and countless other
big corporations routinely propagandize in the other direction, largely to
win governmental support they don't need. But so long as environmentalists
approve of the message, they've got no problem whatsoever with the
messengers.