The weather man marveled, "And when [Beavan] was with us, he kind of shared the idea that not only did he do an entire year of living, trying to make no impact on the environment, but he thought he would carry it through with his book." Champion has aggressively promoted Beavan, who went a year without toilet paper, cars and electricity in an attempt to be carbon neutral.
The environmentalist has made three appearances on GMA in the last two years to promote his experiment, which eventually became a book and a movie. And in this segment, as when Beavan last appeared on September 3, 2009, Champion made no mention of the bizarre decision to forgo bathroom amenities.
Now, certainly, there’s nothing wrong with recycling paper or promoting books being printed that way. But, Champion adopted his "I’ve-just-reread-The-Lorax" tone when he lectured, "Hey, did you know that curling up with a good book has a big impact on the environment? And not necessarily positive."
Proving that liberals can make Americans feel bad about anything, he continued, "Each year, 30 million trees are consumed by the book industry and each book emits nearly nine pounds of greenhouse gases by the time you total up how it was all put together."
A transcript of the September 15 segment, which aired at 8:31am EDT, follows:
[Just One Thing segment]
SAM CHAMPION: Hey, did you know that curling up with a good book has a big impact on the environment? And not necessarily positive. Each year, 30 million trees are consumed by the book industry and each book emits nearly nine pounds of greenhouse gases by the time you total up how it was all put together. I know that’s incredible, but there are moves now to make it so much better. There's a nonprofit Green Press Initiative that is going into each one of these printing houses, if they'd like. And it’s telling them how to do things like our friend Colin Beavan did, with his book. It's 100 percent recycled paper. And when he was with us, he kind of shared the idea that not only did he do an entire year of living, trying to make no impact on the environment, but he thought he would carry it through with his book. And this book is all on recycled paper. All of it. Now, that's a lot to ask of these folks. So, the Green Press Initiative will try to put these things on books [points to recycled sticker on a book] to let you know that even books like this are 30 percent recycled paper, which is a good start.
