Do you want to be “green cool”? It’ll cost you.
Time magazine’s global warming advocacy journalist Bryan Walsh wrote about Joe Harberg, “an energy-efficiency guru” who runs a business auditing people’s energy use and selling them “efficient” solutions to “save money at home.”
According to Walsh’s article Harberg said, “It’s an art to figure out how to save money at home. We do the work.” Harberg launched his business, Current Energy, in 2005.
So how did Time suggest saving all that money by being energy efficient? By spending $514 on products from Harberg’s retail store, like energy consumption monitors and solar chargers. That’s almost the entire $600 rebate the government will be sending many people as part of the stimulus package. [1]
Here’s what you’d get for that $514: a “Digital PowerCost Monitor” to measure your energy consumption, one “Magic Globe” solar-powered light, a “Solio Solar Charger,” a “Solar Backpack,” and a “Kill A Watt” meter that monitors the power use of appliances. Walsh didn’t say how long it takes to charge a laptop in that solar backpack or what to do on cloudy days.
But even that expensive goody bag of “green” isn’t all a person would have to buy in order to be energy-efficient. According to Walsh’s article, “Maximizing the efficiency in your home means more than just chucking your incandescent lightbulbs … Just as a house is more than four walls and a door, energy efficiency should be holistic, with insulation, appliances, lighting and clean electricity all working together.”
No word on how much all of that would cost you.
Walsh recently encouraged readers to go to an environmentalist Web site because it might be their last change to see the “polar world.” “Man your computers – GlobalWarming101.com [2] might give you a last glimpse of a dying polar world,” he wrote on February 22 for the Time Web site.
This is the same man who lobbied international leaders to be proactive fighting climate change [3] and accused President George W. Bush of “foot-dragging” back in December 2007.
Despite Walsh’s penchant for alarmism, there are many people who argue that global warming will not be the catastrophe predicted in the media. On March 2-4, more than 100 panelists and 500 participants will meet in Manhattan to discuss this often-neglected side of the global warming debate at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change [4].
Photo illustration from Time.com
Related Links:
The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, March 2-4 [4]
BMI's Special Report "Fire & Ice: Journalists have warned of climate change for 100 years, but can't decide weather we face an ice or warming" [5]
BMI's page devoted entirely to global warming and climate change in the media.