Profiting From Green
by S. T. Karnick
Issue 105 -April 9, 2008

A new TV network, Planet Green, is about to provide a forum for allegedly "eco-friendly" lifestyle choices. In reality, this entire movement will make money for opportunists and phonies and hurt everybody else.

Emblematizing the takeover of the Green movement by commercial interests, Discovery Communications LLC has announced the launch date for the transformation of its low-rated Discovery Home network into Planet Green, a channel devoted to—you guessed it—"green" lifestyle choices.

The intent is certainly decent.

Or is it?

In reality, the change is just another moneymaking scheme as businesses take advantage of the environmental movement to encourage consumers to throw out perfectly good and usable products and replace them with more expensive ones. Similarly, businesses are using "eco-friendly" claims to encourage consumers to use services they don't need and that they would otherwise dismiss as poor uses of their money.

Like many new magazines and websites, Planet Green is intended to lure advertisements from companies seeking to persuade environmentally conscious individuals to buy their products and services, which are nearly always more expensive and less efficient—and in most cases less kind to the environment—than products and services not labeled green.

The examples of green products and services that actually harm the environment when used as replacements for traditional items are legion. It's good to save water, for example, especially if you live in one of the arid regions west of the Mississippi. But a great number of suggested means of saving water are entirely unnecessary and in fact stupid if you live in the Great Lakes region or the South. Why? Because the efforts to save water in such places require more energy and resources than it would take to continue current processes.

Consider, for example, the absolutely brilliant federal law banning homes from having toilets with a flush capacity above the government-mandated maximum. That means that people will often have to flush two or three times to accomplish what one flush used to do. They end up using more water than otherwise.

The same is true of the government-mandated switchover to fluorescent light bulbs. It will make tons of money for GE and other manufacturers but create much inconvenience for householders and can end up using significantly more electricity—because the bulbs do not achieve full radiance immediately, which incandescents do, which means that you have to leave the light on if you intend to go into and out of a room, instead of switching it on and off each time. And there are numerous other problems with the bulbs.

That sort of inefficiency is repeated throughout the entire realm of "eco-friendly" products and services. Environmental activists may pretend that efficiency is just around the corner, but they've never trusted American industry to make the right choices before, preferring instead to impose government mandates whenever possible, abridging the freedoms of businesses and individuals alike.

This is no different, and as businesses attempt to go with the political flow (always the wise course, alas) and find a way to profit from the nonsense we're all forced to live with, endeavors such as Planet Green are not something to be lauded but instead to be lamented.

Freedoms lost are extremely difficult to regain, and the economic destruction that will come from our current-day environmentally motivated loss of freedom will hurt everyone.

Everyone, that is, except those who can make money off of it or already have so much that they won't even notice the inefficiency and higher costs of falsely claimed "eco-friendly" business.

The rest of us will suffer the consequences of their arrogance.

S. T. Karnick maintains the American Culture website, http://stkarnick.com.