Pirate's Cove

Healing the planet is hawd woik!

(Climate Progress) Let’s be honest. Even those of us who actively follow environmental issues have a difficult time changing our behavior. I rarely unplug all my appliances, although I know they use energy even when they are off. Sometimes, I throw a few things in the wash instead of waiting for a full load because I “need” them right away. Why do I do these things? Because, frankly, I have some bad habits, and it is very difficult to mentally quantify the impacts of these actions or comprehend the aggregated savings from changing my behavior.

So, your belief set isn’t strong enough for you to change your actual behavior. Color me shocked.

However, if you told me I could get some free ice cream at the end of the month in exchange for unplugging my appliances… well I’d probably do it. And it’s likely a lot of others would too. While the behavioral science behind this phenomenon is incredibly interesting, let’s instead take a look at a company who is tackling this problem in a creative way — and using promises of ice cream to change the world.

So, all it would take for you to briefly change your big energy usage ways is….ice cream. Except, ice cream is bad for hotcoldwetdry, because it takes large amounts of energy to keep the delicious concoction frozen. And the most commonly used refrigerant, hydrofluorocarbon, is bad for the ozone layer and global warming.

Now, HFCs are being fingered as a culprit in today’s environmental hot-button issue: global warming. One ton of HFCs does as much atmospheric damage as 1,300 tons of carbon dioxide, the better-known global-warming gas, according to the United Nations. As a result, companies are scrambling to phase out the HFCs they just phased in.

Oops. Greenpeace has spoken. No ice cream for you. Just create new habits (Warmists would love these habits to be enforced by government regulation).

Now, there is nothing wrong with reducing your power usage. It’d be great if companies voluntarily worked to create appliances that used less power, and even better, ones that use less “vampire power”, such as DVRs and cable boxes. Hey, save money.