Yeah, But I Can Still HEAR You Costas!

NBC kicked off its "Green Week" last night by turning off the studio lights at the tail end of the Football Night in America Broadcast and broadcast the remainder of the show, the halftime show, and post-game show by candle light.

NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” officially will become a “green” show this weekend, as it kicks off an initiative that will see the broadcaster televise 150 hours of environmentally-themed content this week across its broadcast and cable networks, online sites and mobile platforms. … Green week will start one hour into “Football Night in America,” at 8:00pm ET. That’s when studio host Bob Costas will explain the initiative. … About 90 seconds before the end of the pre-game show, NBC literally plans to turn the lights out, having the pregame crew finish the show in the dark. The studio lights will stay off through the halftime and post-game shows.

During the halftime show Costa's claimed that the energy saved doing the "dark" show could power an average household for one year.

While other networks have begun to jump on the "green" bandwagon, NBC really seems to be the first network to fully embrace the green movement (even their website has "gone green") which is not surprising considering their unabashed love affair of all things liberal and Democrat.

I applaud NBC for their initiative in theory, but in practice I think the dark studio missed its mark. When you consider the the size of theCO2 footprint that is left by the air miles logged by the teams/announcers/analysts/crew, the energy used to power Lincoln Financial Field, and the incessant babbling of Bob Costas/Kieth Olbermann/Al Michael/John Madden (the biggest babbler of them all), having the studio lights off for a while starts to feel like an empty gesture...especially when they decide to keep the Toyota sign lit (gotta keep the advertisers happy).

In the end what did this symbolic gesture accomplish? NBC gets to show off how "green" they are, GE will sell more energy efficient light bulbs, and we didn't have to look at Olbermann's goofy mug. Great, but where do we go from here? What happens when Green Week is over? This is a conversation that the world needs to have, and not just during halftime of a football game.

Where's Al Gore when you need him?

If they really wanted to conserve energy last night, they should have turned the lights off at the Linc so no one had to watch the Eagles stink up the joint.

Looking for tips on what you can do to be more "green"? Check out The Daily Green, a great "green" website for regular people.