With Earth Day upon us, everyone should reaffirm their commitment to helping the environment by sitting around on their carbon buttprints and watching TV. If that idea sounds preposterous, you probably haven’t been paying attention to the public-service announcements you can see incessantly on various networks (including the numerous NBC channels — whose parent company, GE, stands to profit handsomely from our promised Brave New Green World). And you definitely haven’t been paying attention to the outer fringes of the cable spectrum.
From the people that brought you the Discovery Channel, Planet Green is available in roughly half the nation’s television homes. Even if you don’t know about it, there’s a good chance it’s tucked away somewhere in the triple digits of your program guide.
Now, if you expect me to be cynical about a cable channel that purports to offer up tips for eco-friendly living 24 hours a day — well, you’re entirely correct. That’s not to say I haven’t given the channel a fair shake. I’m not a knee-jerk anti-green reactionary (though I prefer the term “conservationism” for a host of reasons). And at one point in my quest to be more environmentally aware, I had loaded up the family DVR with so many hours of Planet Green programming it threatened to delete unseen episodes of 30 Rock — an act my wife considered so treasonous that if it had happened, I’d probably have come home to find my clothes on the porch.
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There’s a good case to make that this channel is everything that’s off-putting about the environmental movement in one convenient portal. About 75 percent of its programming falls under two categories — celebrity shows and “Ooh! Look at my gorgeous house!” In both cases, the unwritten subtext is that environmentalism is pretty much a luxury item.
And the worst part is that this is rarely acknowledged. On an episode of
Renovation Nation — where we learn “our nation has a challenge: How do we renovate our homes in a way that’s in sync with the planet?” — the affable host toured the eco-friendly home of actors David Alan Basche and Alysia Reiner (he’s a journeyman TV actor who played Todd Beamer in
United 93, and she’s probably best known for a small role in
Sideways). They live in a 3,000-square-foot brownstone in Manhattan; considering the cost of New York real estate, that might as well be Versailles.
After offering the host a cup of fair-trade coffee, they explained how they installed eco-friendly radiant heat in the floors, but there was one problem:. They wanted hardwood floors but they couldn’t find many woods that could tolerate the heat in the floor without being damaged.
“I found this bamboo flooring, and it was $176 a square foot, and these are six-foot lengths. Which is fabulous — that’s really affordable,” explained Reiner. The show’s host nearly spit out his fair-trade coffee. “You are not going to convince anybody this is affordable,” he said.
Among untold hours of watching shows such as
Renovation Nation, World’s Greenest Homes, and Ed Begley’s reality show (he tools around various celebs’ homes) — this was the only time I saw anyone mention that all the solar panels, grey-water-recycling pumps, custom-made reclaimed-barnwood cabinets, etc., are really, really expensive. From a design and engineering perspective, it’s all very interesting, the kind of stuff you read about in
Popular Science and marvel at. In the real world, Planet Green’s “remodeling tips” are rarely more than unattainable nonsense. It will likely be years or decades before any of this is affordable. In that sense, the epithet “limousine liberal” has outlived its usefulness. “Wind-turbine liberal” is more like it.
An episode of
Greenovate — yes, there are two different eco-remodeling shows on the channel — drives this point home. An L.A. house-flipper tries to renovate a hundred-year-old Victorian. Her budget is just $40,000 (which would pay for less than 250 square feet of Basche and Reiner’s bamboo flooring.). She remains convinced that marketing the renovation as a “green” home will make her more money on the resale. But the house needs a lot of work, and that means some hard choices. For instance, formaldehyde-free plywood is an extra $30 a sheet — or $2,600 of her budget.
The house-flipper had wanted to put in custom-made cabinets, but instead settles for prefabricated-fiberboard cabinets because of unexpected cost overruns (like her eco-friendly plywood) Now, if you were a house-flipper, which would you think increases the value of a house more: custom cabinets, or knowing the hidden plywood in the house is chemical-free? Maybe there’s some odd market segment in La-La Land that prefers the plywood, but we never find out the true value of a green house, because the house-flipper decides to move her family into the house rather than resell it.
