Green initiatives are a great thing, but sometimes, you have to wonder if all of them are truly appropriate. Last week, the annual Christmas Tree lighting at Rockefeller Center officially "went green" by installing the largest privately owned solar roof in Manhattan.
It will be used to power the 30,000 LED light bulbs which will be replacing the tree's old incandescants. Of course, the bulbs and the solar roof are GE products, which makes sense since after all, they are adorning the GE building.
TishmanSpeyer, the owner of 30 Rockefeller Center, is very proud to announce that the solar array will create a 70-kilowatt DC generation station as well, which will be tied into the grid at ConEdison. Additionally, as part of the cradle-to-cradle aspect of this occasion, the 84 foot high Norway Spruce will be cut into wood that will be used for homes to be built by
Habitat for Humanity.
Although all of this is terrific, and great news for the reduction of carbon emissions, has anyone actually done a carbon footprint cost analysis for chopping down this tree, shipping it to New York City, then taking it down,
cutting it up, and shipping it out, vs using a manufactured tree? This train of thought may seem sacreligious, but it certainly is worth thinking about.
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· http://www.williamtwhitacre.com If you look at some of the oil that is now being produced because it is economically possible you will find that in is actually using more energy to produce it than the amount of enegy it will produce!
Economics and public opinion will always skew things sometimes in the right direction, sometimes not.
At least the Green Movement has raised a lot of peoples awareness of how their choices and actions effect the world. In the long run if you look at the extra carbon footprint cost of the entire tree process and think of it like an investment, the payoff by getting people to think about their own carbon footprint and how to reduce it may be greater than what we first see.
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12/19/07 @ 10:29 
