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Pardon Me While I Have a Green Moment
by Jason Longman
I’m starting to feel the pressure . . .
Apparently, I’m not doing enough about global warming. My car burns good old-fashioned gas. Not only have I never purchased a carbon offset, I wouldn’t know how. Wind power seems like a good idea, but frankly my homeowners association won’t allow me to put a one-foot-high statue in my front yard, much less a 10-story windmill.
The NBC television network is trying to help me out. Last fall, they wove in a “green” theme to many of their weekly TV shows.
Politicians are trying. Every single candidate that ran for president of the United States believed that we needed to protect the environment, but I wonder if all their jabbering contributed to greenhouse gases.
Hollywood is trying. Actors and celebrities have adopted the “green movement” as the cause du jour, replacing potable drinking water in Third World countries as their big thing. Al Gore tried so hard that he won a Nobel Prize for his documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth.
Even my 19-month-old daughter, Sophia, is trying. She sat me down the other day and lectured me about reducing my carbon footprint. Actually, I’m not sure what she was talking about, but I’m pretty sure it had something to do with Elmo or environmental sustainability.
Of course, I could point out that many of these people are hypocrites. I could point out that Hillary Clinton has called for dramatic changes to address greenhouse gases—by 2030, long after she will have left political office. President George W. Bush called for an international greenhouse gas conference aimed at . . . nonbinding agreements to reduce greenhouse gases.
Hollywood? While the fact that tabloid celebrities jet around the country in a private plane definitely qualifies for “sign of the apocalypse” status, I’m reasonably sure that the fuel wasted to power that jet is not environmentally friendly.
And talk about not throwing stones when you live in a glass house. Remember all the e-mails that were passed around last year regarding Al Gore’s mansion in Tennessee? It seems that his 10,000-square-foot Belle Meade residence consumed electricity at a rate of 12 times the average for a typical house in nearby Nashville. When is Melissa Etheridge going to write a song about that? To be fair, Gore purchases a significant amount of carbon offsets through Green Power Switch and has installed solar panels and compact fluorescent bulbs in his home, which could have been a key factor in Nobel Prize voting.
Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely support the “green movement.” I just believe that the best way is to be personally responsible. So I decided to take the first step.
I loaded the entire family into my hydrocarbon-powered SUV and drove to the local hardware store. We walked over to the aisle with the compact fluorescent light bulbs. I had decided our first step would be purchasing these light bulbs that use less power and last longer. After regarding the price and arranging a quick second mortgage, we bought two for our master bedroom.
I have to tell you, after we managed to pry open the environmentally unfriendly packaging and screw those lights into our bedside lamps, I felt good. I was doing my part!
Those environmentally correct shining lights were just a reminder that it takes very little to make a difference. Every time I turned on those lamps, I felt a surge of pride. In fact, I left my bedside lamp on all day just to remind me of that.
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