Green Ice: NHL's New Jersey Devils Make Nod In Green Direction with Compact Fluorescent Giveaway

I really should handle this one. The good news is that Stephen is back from his Far East honeymoon, safe and sound, but while he'd usually be our hockey correspondent -- given the fact that he cares about the sport, and I only write about it when my other job requires it -- he's 1) currently saddled with a body clock that is telling him it's 13:72 a.m., Bermuda Triangle time and 2) such a devout New York Rangers fan that it'd be hard for him to write a post about the New Jersey Devils without inserting all-caps "Let's Go Rangers" interjections throughout. And anyway, as New Jersey relatives, we both share a track record with the Devils that goes back to their old Christmas Tree Color Scheme days, so I'm qualified. At any rate, it's not hard to report: the Devils, in conjunction with the energy-minded Canadian nonprofit Project Porchlight, will be giving away compact fluorescent bulbs to all 18-and-over attendees of Wednesday night's home game against the Ottawa Senators. It's a nice gesture, of course, and compact fluorescent bulbs are The Official Type of Light Bulb of gbNYC (tm), but does it mean anything?

Project Porchlight would argue that it does -- the group's founder, Stuart Hickox, was inspired to take action after reading, on Canada's Energy Star website that, "if every household in Canada replaced just one incandescent light bulb with a CFL bulb, the reduction in pollution would be the equivalent of taking 66,000 cars off the road." And that's obviously a good thing. Project Porchlight, as a component of the broader One Change campaign, fits within an inarguably beneficial green niche: call it, with apologies to Gandhi, "Be the Comparatively Easy to Make Change You Want to See." Your author proudly inhabits said niche, for instance. And in that regard, of course, the bulb giveaway is an excellent idea.

At another level of remove, though, it would mean a lot more if this promotion grew out of a real commitment to sustainability on the part of the Devils. While I've already raked my formerly beloved New Jersey Nets over the coals for their facile, buzz-grabbing Nets Go Green campaigns in the past, the Devils present a different case. The Nets' campaign was the brainchild of Brett Yormark, the team's fraudulent, mega-glib PR maestro, and flew in the face of every choice the franchise has made since being bought by the defiantly un-green -- at least when he's not getting $1.5 million in state funds per LEED-registered unit of affordable housing -- NYC real estate developer Bruce Ratner as the centerpiece to his planned (and not so green) Atlantic Yards development. The Nets' promotion was, in short, a greenwash, and one that -- like so many of Yormark's more embarrassing campaigns -- seemed half-baked and primarily designed to draw the cheapest of cheap PR heat. One game's worth of carbon offsets is certainly better than none, but the Nets (and Ratner) have generally eschewed any opportunity to make a real commitment to sustainability.

The Devils may well be a different story -- we really don't know. Despite requests from Stephen as to information on its operations and design of the Devils' new home, Newark's Prudential Center, the team has been weirdly coy about its green bona fides. Which is in turn doubly weird considering that PruCenter architect Morris Adjmi has some fine green designs to his credit here in New York, and that the appealing PruCenter certainly doesn't seem like your traditional energy-guzzling concrete bandbox. While swapping out an incandescent light bulb for a compact fluorescent is inarguably a good move, and something you should consider the next time a bulb goes out in your home, it pales in comparison to the impact that could be made by, say, a huge sports arena greening up its operations. Just to take a for-instance. So while we applaud the Devils for the Project Porchlight giveaway, we'd deliver a standing ovation for a commitment to increased sustainability at The Prudential Center. Well, I would. Stephen would be sitting there in a Rangers jersey, checking his Blackberry.