Ed Begley Jr.’s Green Ways Go Mainstream Environment
By Susan Abram
For years, people thought he was an extremist for his ultra- green lifestyle, but now Ed Begley Jr. has become the focus of major corporations that work with Hollywood on how to produce environmentally friendly entertainment.
On Tuesday, Begley, a Studio City resident and star of the reality show "Living with Ed," offered a keynote address at the first Hollywood Goes Green conference at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.
Representatives from General Motors, NBC Universal, Subway restaurants and IBM joined other companies to discuss ways to reduce waste and increase the use of natural energy to produce films, music and TV shows.
"I had hoped all of this would happen at some point," Begley said of the industry’s interest. "There’s a lot of people that can come together to do this, because in addition, it makes financial sense."
On "Living with Ed," featured on HGTV, Begley and his wife, Rachelle, conduct "green audits" on celebrity homes, show how to recycle waste and use solar energy.
In an upcoming episode, for example, Begley will install a Greenswitch Home Energy system. With a flip of a light switch, the system shuts off wasted, standby power, including cell-phone chargers and other "vampire power."
"Going into the show, I thought I had a wealth of knowledge, but I’m learning something new all the time," Begley said. "There are many great companies out there offering new products."
The two-day conference is being coordinated by iHollywoodForum, which introduced the topic of how the entertainment industry could take a leadership role to become an incubator for green technologies.
IBM announced a new strategy to cut the number of computer servers used in the entertainment industry in half. There were 6,000 computer servers used to make one "Lord of the Rings" film, and all those servers are stored in massive air-conditioned "data centers."
Nationwide, there are 6,500 of these data centers, and combined they consume as much energy as the entire state of Utah, said Jim Gargan, who represented IBM.
"We want to produce less amount of energy for the same amount of entertainment," Gargan said.
Actor Larry Hagman also shared how natural energy saves money. After he installed his first solar panels on his home’s roof in 2003 for $750,000, his annual electric bill for his mountaintop Ojai home and 46-acre ranch fell from $37,000 to $13.
The "Dallas" star, who played the conniving and anything-for-a- dollar oil baron J.R. Ewing, said going green ultimately saves greenbacks.
"Anybody that uses electricity in the next 10 years will be paying a tremendous amount of money for it," Hagman said. "And I won’t be paying anything."
susan.abram(at)dailynews.com