Go Green, Don't be an Idiot

Recently, we observed Earth Hour wherein we were encouraged to switch off all electrical appliances, including lights, for an entire one hour. You know, since one hour of Amish existence can replenish all of the Earth's resources. But this is no time for sarcasm. Granted, I almost strangled my brother over that one hour considering I couldn't even charge my iPod and all the ice cream in the fridge had melted, I was also intrigued enough to look up NDTV's Greenathon, a non-profit venture for environment awareness.

Commendable attempt. Really. They've made over 2.4 crores to facilitate villages with solar panels. They have their own anthem and everything. And then I saw this: they held a concert for promoting the cause.

Not that a concert isn't an extremely awesome PR strategy. It's just... thousands of megawatts of electricity go into powering those things, not to mention all those celebrities with their over-inflated senses of egos they had to house and the massive television audience they catered to LIVE. There was an argument that the hosts didn't mind this fact, since it reached a large percentage of the population and they made more than enough money to compensate. That does nothing but bring out the impression that those tools at NDTV believe it's OK to waste electricity if you can pay for it. And about it "reaching the masses" : walk along Marine Drive for a couple of minutes and you'll see exactly how effective this whole thing was.

Then again, NDTV might not be the biggest idiot of all, considering eminent personalities have done equally ridiculous things. Chris Martin, lead singer and overall douchebag of Coldplay, said that his band took the initiative to plant 10,000 mango trees right here in India to compensate for all those private jets they use to fly around the world, even though there is scientific evidence that no number of trees can cause carbon dioxide fixation to such a large degree that it compensates for their constant jet-setting.

I don't care about my carbon footprint, I just
want to eat roasted peanuts on my jet.

Even Al Gore, former Vice President of USA, organized the Live Earth concert in 2007 and flew in hundreds of thousands of celebrities, artists and crew, many of them by private jets. That basically released about 31,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the air for that one day alone.

If you wanna talk about carbon footprints, it doesn't get any bigger than this.
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