Commentary - Timothy Carney: NBC’s ‘Green Week’ and GE’s green

Amid its calls for individual sacrifices in the name of the environment and paeans to “green” legislation, the network once again failed to disclose prominently that its parent company stands to get rich off of “environmentalist” laws.

NBC Universal is owned by General Electric, which plays a regular role in this column because of how aggressively the company has hitched its profits to its lobbying successes. GE spends more than any other corporation in America on lobbying the federal government — more than $20 million annually over the past three years — and Green Week and Earth Week probably should be disclosed as lobbying efforts.

In many of GE’s businesses, the profit model appears to be: (1) invest in something for which there isn’t much demand; (2) then lobby to mandate or subsidize it.

Wind turbines are a great example. GE describes itself as “one of the world’s leading wind turbine suppliers.” Absent subsidies, however, there might be no windmill industry, because windmills cannot reliably produce energy, and certainly not as affordably as traditional fuels such as coal.

Germany’s energy agency examined its subsidized wind industry and concluded in 2005: “Instead of spending billions on building new wind turbines, the emphasis should be on making houses more energy efficient.” But making houses more energy efficient doesn’t make GE rich.

GE spends millions lobbying to protect and expand the cornucopia of wind subsidies that includes a “production tax credit” for wind farms, government mandates on utilities to buy wind power and local subsidies. In one case in upstate New York, the GE turbines will be powering a wind farm completed using eminent domain.

GE’s coal gasification, solar power generation, electric cars and biodiesel businesses are the same: Consumers and investors acting with their own money would not patronize these technologies, but Congress, acting with your money, will. GE’s $20 million annual lobbying budget sees to it.

GE has also launched a venture dealing in “greenhouse gas credits,” which are literally worthless until Congress starts limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Throw in the expensive but unattractive light bulbs they’ve convinced Congress to mandate, and the pattern is clear.

But the innocent viewer of NBC isn’t informed of the network’s vested interest in environmental laws. He is just fed a parade of beautiful celebrities talking about the virtues and necessity of “going green.” If David Schwimmer and Alicia Silverstone can convince you to become an environmentalist, then GE has “grassroots” demand for the federal policies that will enrich it.

Most of the NBC “green” programming has not directly called for government intervention, focusing instead on personal, voluntary conservation measures, most of which are laudable. Wastefulness is a vice, and leaving more materials and energy for your neighbors is a virtue, but the backbeat of the NBC programming is alarmism.

The network’s reports on melting snow in South America (with no complementary report on the cooling oceans) or its exhortations to fly during the day instead of at night to reduce your carbon footprint, make viewers more likely to back the federal greenhouse gas limits that will make its GHG-credit investments worth something.

But sometimes it pours it on a bit thicker. Tuesday morning, Tom Brokaw went on NBC to give a talk about the first Earth Day. “It was a massive success,” Brokaw explained, because “the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act quickly followed. President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency.”

There’s the rub. Everyone who rolls her eyes at “Earth Week” or lectures from Schwimmer on “going green” was bracing for that. Environmentalism today almost always means government intervention. Government intervention means higher costs and higher taxes. And as this column has documented for more than a year, government intervention usually means profits for a well-connected special interest.

It would be nice if GE would disclose its interest in convincing America to “go green.”

Examiner columnist Timothy P. Carney is senior reporter for the Evans & Novak Political Report.