I used to work with a lady who you could call 'green' without stretching the truth much. She did things like only put a few pages of paper in the photocopier*, turn the toaster off at the power point to conserve energy**, force everyone to use a kettle instead of the instantaneous hot water system*** and turn the lights off on you while you were in the bathroom****. Needless to say her efforts to create a 'green' work environment only served to really annoy everyone and never actually achieved all that much. Now don't get me wrong, I think its great to want to save the world, after all Superman does it all the time, but sometimes its not doing anything (except annoying everyone). Here is some guy who must now work with this lady, and I thought we used to get annoyed. Poor ol' Andrew Bolt has clearly lost faith in Earth Hour.
He hits on an interesting point though where he says "the ultra greens, "the original tree-loving hippies and Greenpeace embracers", turned out to be perfect specimens of our time.
They were not only the most likely to vote Green and join green groups, but also the most likely to own a 4WD and join frequent-flyer clubs". Amazingly New Scientist came up with an actual experiment that found the same thing.
It makes me glad I rebelled against the 'green office' lady and left my monitor on stand-by on weekends and holidays.
*this was to encourage people to print less by having to constantly re-fill the paper tray. It didn't work and it just annoyed everyone
**this was to prevent unnecessary 'stand-by' power usage, the fact a toaster doesnt have stand-by didn't deter her, and it just annoyed everyone
***this was because she was convinced the instantaneous hot water heater worked by constantly keeping about 500mL water boiling hot, no explainations of how instantaneous how water works would sway her, and it just annoyed everyone
****checking to see if anyone is actually in the bathroom wastes energy, best to just turn it off and see if anyone yells at you
No comments:
Post a Comment