flawed:LOGIC

Let’s face it, my entire life has been one long string of lazyness and not caring. That’s not to say that I didn’t care about people but if I was doing something – anything – and someone else wasn’t clearly and directly involved, there was a good chance that I would do the absolute bare minimum to accomplish whatever task I was currently in the middle of. While some examples of this would be rather innocuous like ensuring dirty laundry stayed within the confines of my room rather than the house, but others were a little more serious, like instead of placing the wrapper of my freshly eaten cheeseburger in the now empty bag sitting next to me, I would placed it on the opposite side of me. Coincidentally, this opposite side of me would also happen to be a window….providing access to ground whipping by at approximately 80 kilometers an hour. And a side view mirror. But mostly the ground.

Not so good.

Last night, I happened upon the MSN webpage for the Live Earth concert series occurring this weekend. For those of you who don’t watch a lot of TV, I’ll give you a quick synopsis of what’s going on. Live Earth is an organization headed up by the one and only Al Gore, dedicated to promoting awareness of climate change. I know what you’re thinking: “blah blah blah Earth is heating up blah blah blah polar ice caps melting blah blah blah wear sunscreen or die blah blah blah”. OK, you might not be thinking that, but before I heard about Live Earth, it’s what I would think any time I heard anyone talk about global warming. At any rate, Live Earth decided to raise awareness by doing what Live 8 did 2 years ago, and put on 8 simultaneous concerts worldwide with some of the biggest names in music. Except they did one better, and are broadcasting all the live feeds on the internet, so that if you get sick of watching one performer, you’re no more than 2 clicks (usually just 1) away from tuning into another country and hearing someone else.

Now why this matters, is that in between each set (which is usually 3-4 songs, but sometimes 5), they have these “blipverts” which are really just short commercials with a different name, but rather than try and sell you some stupid product that 99% of the human population would never even consider purchasing, provide some statistic about reducing, reusing, or recycling. I wasn’t really paying too much attention to them until one hit pretty close to home.

Without getting into the health debate, anyone who has spent more than about 8 seconds around me knows that I drink pop. And not just a little pop. We’re talking about 1-2L a day. Yes, really that much. Anyways, one statistic they provided was that recycling a single pop can saves enough energy to power a television for 3 hours. Three hours. When I heard that, my mind flashed back to the past week and thought about how many TVs I could have powered if I would have thrown my pop cans in the recycling, rather than in the garbage.

OK, that might be a bit of a lie, being that I usually drink out of bottles, rather than cans, but the fact remains: I took notice of how much waste I generate. Soon afterwards (somewhere between 1 and 9 seconds later), I made the New Half Year’s resolution to be more conscious of the energy I consume, and do my part to reduce my personal consumption in any way I can.

Before you start blocking my phone number and start screaming “STOP PREACHING TO ME FOR GODS SAKE!”, I don’t want any of you to get the impression that I’m going to be harping on anyone for wasting energy. I mean, sure, it would be great if we as a people could just stop, but I’m just going to do my part. No more, no less. If you follow suit, fantastic. If you decide not to, great for you. If you decide to increase how much energy you use because in your sick and twisted little wormy brain, you think “Well, I gotta make up for him, amirite guys HAHAHAH RIGHT GUYS? THROW ME ANOTHER BREWSKY!!!” then I hope you choke on your own tongue.

In all seriousness though, now that I’ve actually had a chance to think about it, I waste a lot of energy, and it’s about time I get my act together, grow up, and start being a bit more responsible for myself. Whether you think the same about yourself is ultimately up to you, yourself and…you?… but I really think that no matter how “green” you may be, there’s always something you can do better.

Things I plan do differently:

• Quit littering
• Instead of defaulting all garbage to a waste bin, recycle as much of it as I can
• Set my computers and related devices to go into sleep mode after 3 minutes of non-use
• Turn off lights when I leave a room
• Move this website to a server in a datacenter that uses 100% solar energy in the near future
• Stop smoking (Been nicotine free for over a month, so I think we can count this one as “Complete”)

Maybe these acts will “save the earth”, maybe they won’t. All I know is that if (God forbid) I have grandkids someday and they ask me “Grampa J, why did your generation let the Earth turn itself into a slow cooking rotisserie?” I don’t want to have to come up with some excuse; I’m too lazy for that.