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 network devoted to, you guessed it, "green" lifestyle choices.
The intent is certainly decent.
Or is it?
In reality, it’s 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.
The network is intended to lure advertisements from companies seeking environmentally conscious nitwits to buy their products and services, which will invariably be 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 nice to save water, for example—if you live somewhat west of the Mississippi. But a great number of means of doing so 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 what we have been doing.
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 most people will simply flush two or three times to accomplish what one flush used to do. They end up using much 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 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 intstead 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) 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.
A further thought on the Planet Green rebranding: It could be primarily a strategy to get a slot on cable companies’ lower tiers by giving them something politically correct to promote themselves with. Not that I’d have any problem with a cable company’s choice to pick up programming they thought viewers would want to watch–and I haven’t any idea what financial arrangements figure into it–but I don’t think the decision to carry a channel always has much to do with that calculation.
And as most people know, carbon dioxide is what plants breathe during the daylight hours, so as a result, a more carbon dioxide rich atmosphere means greater and more abundant plant life across the planet, as has been scientifically documented.
So, ironically, if “green” efforts to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should succeed, the planet will actually be less “green.”
But at least we’ll all be poorer, which appears to be these people’s real desire.
CC: Speaking of falling flat.
CO2 emissions are BAD? It is only a matter of time until some WAG convinces some pols to ban soft drinks and mixers due to their CO2 content.
Statist interests in Coke, Pepsi, and Cadbury Schweppes will put a stopper in that.
Thanks, C C. Here’s hoping that good sense will prevail.
Cheer up–if this move falls flat on its face, it will help label unthinking environmentalism as a fad in the public’s mind sooner than might otherwise happen. In my experience, media vehicle launches that are content-driven will find an audience and advertisers, but in that order. Going at it from the other end may be safer from a business perspective, but I don’t think people will find this fun and interesting to watch. When you get down to it, Americans just don’t like to be told what to do.
I tried the fluorescent bulbs in two fixtures that are left on all day for safety and don’t need high wattage, and liked that they saved me money on my electric bill. What I did not like was when they both emitted a burnt smell at the end of their life. Until I know why that happened and how dangerous it was, I am not buying any more. I wonder why this has not been addressed? Meanwhile, I’m stocking up on incandescents.