how did green become the new black?
Unless my calendar, eyes and ears are lying to me, yesterday was Earth Day. The sci-fi environmental epic we know as Avatar was released on DVD and cable channels were busily pitching hybrids and “green” products, trying their best to capitalize on today’s eco-fervor stoked by fears of global warming’s potential effects and a number of commercial campaigns selling supposedly eco-friendly products at a markup. Oh sure, you’ll pay a little extra, but it’s worth it if you actually care about the planet’s future, right? Actually, no. It’s not. Now don’t get me wrong. When you have the chance to get some real benefit from installing solar panels or using a product that doesn’t contain chemicals scientifically proven to be harmful to your health in standard concentrations, by all means, go for it. Just don’t let marketers trick you into buying greenwashed products at drastic markups or hijack perfectly valid ideas, turning energy efficiency and safety into a premium product with a big surcharge.
Take hybrids, which are often billed as a solution to our environmental woes, come packaged with an aura of green fuzzies and sold with commercials about a driver’s harmony with nature. But they’re really an upgrade to the efficiency of a standard gasoline engine. Likewise, solar panels only harness cheap and readily available energy of our home star in our quest to keep up with growing demand, rather than forever change how we can coexist with nature. Same goes for wind, tide and geothermal power. What’s important here isn’t the feeling of reuniting with the Earth or forking over some extra cash to feel like you’ve really helped the planet. No, the real point of clean and cleaner technologies is energy efficiency. We should be aiming to make hybrids and clean energy the standard, relying on the economies of scale to keep prices down and giving consumers more. To elevate some technological advances into luxury products aimed at a stereotypical group of clients is nothing less than a huge disservice to the promise of green tech. All it does is marginalize what we need to save a lot of money, energy and effort in cleaning up our messes down the road, and rolls it up into a political stereotype along with a bigger price tag because of a few key words in the product’s name.
We’re not going to get any closer to nature than we do today. We live in a natural world and spend our lifetimes here. That’s about as close as one can get to septillions of tons of molten rock and billions of tons of flora and fauna. We should be taking care of it not out of some grand spiritual duty to Gaia, or because it’s chic PC. We should be taking care of it because it’s our home and dammit, it’s a lot nicer to live in a clean, neat house than a dingy apartment with dirty laundry and bursting trash bags strewn across the floors. Of course some things emphasized by today’s eco-crusaders will never change. We’re not going to have 100% local, organic farming across the world. Due to the explosion in our population, we need to have huge, centralized, global farms that produce food quickly, cheaply and efficiently.
Without these farms, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death. We could make them more sustainable and look for ways of increasing the overall quality of our food if we take regulation seriously, but not every farm could be free-range and antibiotic-free. Likewise, we’ll need to invest in nuclear fusion and nuclear power because we need them to obtain realistic energy independence. Huge shifts in infrastructure won’t happen overnight. The same goes for greenwashing efforts like the carbon taxes so vilified by conspiracy theorists from the right. They simply give companies the ability to buy a fee to carry on without feeling the market pressure to invest in energy saving and pollution reducing technologies.
If you consider yourself an environmentalist, you should be rebelling at the notion of having “green” turned into a marketing buzzword and thrown around like a political designation. Being “green” should be a goal for every person and every company not because there are warm fuzzies and a feel-good premium attached to asking whether the paint in your new house is chemical X free, but because we have the selfish urge to save money with energy efficient appliances, tax credits, smaller, lighter, fuel sipping cars, and water saving bathrooms. In the quest for a cleaner industrial world, greed could be very useful and motivate people far more than pictures of lush, green meadows and smiling faces of sandal wearing college kids telling them that throwing a battery into the landfill makes the planet really, really sad and might contribute to global warming.
