A car dealer in Washington, Don Beyer Volvo, is offering a new promotion. If you buy one of their cars, the dealership will give you free tickets to Al Gore’s global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Mr. Beyer is a Democrat in good standing, having been lieutenant governor of Virginia and national treasurer of the Dean for America campaign, so he must be down with the global warming program. But giving away movie tickets with the purchase of every climate-destroying luxury automobile (the 2005 Volvo XC90 gets 15 mpg in the city and 20 mpg on the highway) probably isn’t, in the long run, the most effective way to save the planet.
Lots of businesses are trying to profit in the name of the environment these days. My personal favorite are hotels that ask guests to reuse dirty towels and sheets.
On a recent trip to Las Vegas, I stayed at the Monte Carlo, one of the themed monstrosities on the Strip. In the bathroom was a card asking me to “please join Monte Carlo’s effort to conserve water by using your towels more than once.” On the nightstand was another card imploring me to “please help protect our environment” by not having the bed linens changed during my stay. I was moved by these pleas, I really was. Except that outside the hotel are two gigantic fountains spewing precious water into the arid, desert air, 24 hours a day. It struck me that the Monte Carlo’s concern for the environment might simply be an attempt to save on laundry costs.
I’m normally a friend of Gaia, or at least a good acquaintance. I like hiking and being outdoors, so long as there aren’t insects. Or mud. And I don’t care for the way tall grass makes your skin itch. But even a nature lover like me has limits. When I’m paying $259 a night, I want fresh linens.
And it’s not as if the hotels really cared about our Earth Mother. If they did, they’d give a discount rate to customers who put up with damp towels. What’s happened is that Big Business has figured out how to use our environmental consciences against us. We greens who love the environment are now the unwitting tools of our planet’s destruction. Hotels profit from our willingness to conserve, and car dealerships lure us into luxury SUVs under the pretense of supporting Al Gore.
It’s an insidious plot, and the only way to foil it is to kill the environment. If the movie Speed taught me anything, it’s that in a hostage situation, game theory dictates that you have to shoot the hostages to prove they aren’t valuable. That’s how you get the upper hand on the tree-killers or Dennis Hopper or whoever. If we want to save the environment, we’ve got to show we don’t care about it.
It won’t be easy, but I have a plan. For starters, when you check into a hotel, call maid service and tell them you want clean sheets every day. Then leave your used towels on the bathroom floor, indicating that you’d like a clean set. Then, take any unused towels and washcloths and put them on the floor, too. Just to show you mean business. It’s also probably a good idea to take the extra soaps and lotions. A well-placed 2-ounce bottle of green tea olive oil moisturizing shampoo can wreak havoc on an ecosystem.
When you get home from vacation, go straight to the Internet. First, there’s showerbuddy.com, where you can buy a Zoe triple showerhead. In 1992, the federal government passed a law requiring that “all faucet fixtures” have a maximum waterflow of 2.5 gallons per minute. The geniuses at Zoe noticed that the statute said nothing about putting multiple fixtures on the same faucet. Seven and a half gallons per minute sends a heck of a message.
Then there’s the WC. Before he was crusading against global warming, Sen. Gore was lowering the flush capacity of American toilets from 3.5 gallons to 1.6 gallons. But the secret is that the toilet-makers manufacture bowls and tanks separately, and for each bowl they make a 1.6 gallon tank for the States and a 3.5 gallon tank for Canada. Our neighbors to the north sell the big-flush tanks on eBay all the time. You don’t even need to feel guilty about this little act of defiance, since if the Canadians are doing it, it must be virtuous.
Killing the environment will take time. This big ball of mud is pretty resilient. But if we love our planet–and really, who doesn’t?–then we have to show corporate America how little we care about it. Only then will it be safe to be an environmentalist again.
JONATHAN V. LAST
