Hypocrites in Heels.
This is not the kind of attitude that should get a happy smiley “ain’t they cute” story in the New York Times
These days Ms. Barnett, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan whom Women’s Wear Daily once profiled under the headline “Sloan Ranger,” is today a consumer reporter for KNTV, the NBC television affiliate in San Jose, Calif. She recycles and has tossed away her children’s plastic sippy cups. Concerned with carbon emissions, she is about to replace the Barnetts’ two family cars with hybrids. “I turn the water off when I’m brushing my teeth,” she said. “I’m always learning, I’m always trying to improve.”
Still, she has no plans to reduce the family’s significant carbon footprint by, say, selling the Manhattan second home. “I’m not a perfect person,” she said. “I’m not the greenest woman in America.” And there was scant indication that other guests, most of whom, presumably, knew their way up the steps of a private jet, were contemplating major lifestyle cutbacks. Glancing about the room, Ms. Barnett said, “We aren’t all going to move to one-bedroom apartments.”
She would do what she could, she said, pointing to the correlation between commercial cleaners and the toxic residue that sometimes lurks in the tub, forming that grimy bathtub ring. “Basically your kids are bathing in the Love Canal,” she warned, her comments drawing a shudder.
The article is wrong. She’s not doing what she can.
She’s shilling her husband’s business using the environment as a prop.
She could sell her second home. She could live in a smaller home. She could not take private jet trips.
She doesn’t because, quite simply, she doesn’t care all that much. She cares about the money she can make by scaring the bejeezus out of other equally ignorant women with a whole lot of money.
Like this lady:
Ms. Rockefeller wanted four kits, one as a gift to her housekeeper. “I want to spread the word,” she said.
She plans to practice conservation, to a point. Energy-saving light bulbs are fine — for the utility closet, perhaps. In other rooms, “they don’t give a very pretty light,” she said.
And that’s really what the folks who jump out the most publicly about the environment are all about – saving the world, to a point. That point begins where inconveniencing them just a little bit ends. Oh sure, they’ll spend a lot of cash buying carbon credit indulgences. And they’ll spring for a little eco-cleaning kit for their maid.
But changing a few light bulbs and making a small, but real, difference?
Oh heck no. That wouldn’t be “pretty”.
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Category: Oh the Climate, It is A-Changin'
