Green begets greenbacks

I spent Saturday afternoon at an indoor event: the Green Festival. I'd never been to one before. It was packed wall to wall with booths and upscale "sustainable" goods for sale, and a crush of shoppers carrying organic sacks filled with stuff. Because everything is about shopping, after all.

It was the usual suspects and then some: hemp clothing, books on various political and environmental topics, "safe" household cleaning products, toxin-free mattresses, green building materials, recyclers for all the old materials that people rip out of their homes when installing new "green" materials, alternative health practitioners, etc.

As you might expect, the solar panel groups were there. I basically think that PG&E should just install solar panels on everyone's roofs in California, but they're so expensive, and the financial burden (a 15-20 year payoff) is still on the homeowner, even though the energy companies benefit most from the power.

Every time our lifestyles change, new markets spring up. For example, San Francisco recently passed a ban on those awful, crinkly plastic bags that you got whereever you shopped, so there's a new market now for reusable shopping bags, and companies are starting to make them from recycled materials and personalizing them, which of course we all love to do.

I got very "glazed" from wandering amongst the crowd, and did my best to not get stomped on by eager planetsavers.