Cleantech Parasites
It dawned on me today, that after buying green ecommerce store Greenhome.com 8 months ago, we put up links to the site on CleantechBlog.com, and included special coupons for all our Cleantech Blog readers and Cleantech.org members in the monthly emailings. Here I thought people who were making a living off cleantech might *gasp* care about walking the walk and might appreciate it.
I think Greenhome.com saw a total of 3 coupon downloads out of that, and two were spam. Worse, I’ve gotten more than that many personal comments asking why I’d clutter up the cleantech site with blog columns about green products. On Saturdays no less, when the weekend traffic falls off 75%. For the record we pulled those columns a few months ago
Fine save your money or buy somewhere else, but that rate is so abysmally low, it made me wonder if the entire of my audience is completely hypocritic. And yes, it’s the web. And yes, I DO pay attention. I can see what pages y’all click on, and where you comment, I moderate every single one. And several times a week I read every Yahoo, Facebook and LinkedIN comment, and systematically delete and block anyone I find that spams, no appeals. When I ignore you, it’s because you’re being annoying, I mean err, “that comment does not meet our unpublished comment policy or is not conducive to the health of the CleantechBlog.com and Cleantech.org community”.
So I’m pretty sure this group likes to read and talk and b*%&h about cleantech and a greener better world. But do you actually care?
Do you actually think about cleantech, green products, and energy or water use when you’re not at work?
How many of you actually have a solar system?
How many of your light bulbs are now CFLs or LEDs?
How many have done an energy audit?
What green/ecofriendly versions of a product have you actually bought?
Do you know what makes that product green?
Do you actually recycle/compost? Do you do the minimum required, or make an extra effort? At your home? At your office? Do you even know?
Do you have a clue what your energy bill is? How many kW hours you use per square foot? How that compares to the average? – For the record, when I asked a number of people that question at the last Cleantech Forum, I got a bunch of very polite laughs.
Or, and please excuse the language, are you just a cleantech parasite sucking off the teat of the government subsidies in cleantech? Warren Buffett literally eats the food from the restaurants he owns, right? Do you even bother to turn your lights off? 😉 What’s the phrase? Oh yeah, “the choice is yours”.