by shamanic
First of all, who knew that one in three Canadians maintain a secondary refrigerator as a "beer fridge"? I thought one of the joys of living in Canada was that for much of the year, you could just put the beer on the porch to keep it cold.
Well, apparently waiting for Montreal winters doesn't work for many Canadians, who have retained older model fridges in their garages at an energy cost of some 3500 million kWh each year. Researchers suggest incentives and buy-back programs to remove the inefficient models.
Fox News, perhaps predictably, approached this story with tongue planted firmly in cheek. I found it through Memorandum, and actually ended up looking through the Fox main page to see if this was categorized in some kind of 'humor' or 'oddity' section. Why? Because of the general tone of the piece, sure, but mostly because of this: The problem is that the beer fridges are mostly decades-old machines that began their second careers as beverage dispensers when Canadians upgraded to more energy-efficient models to store whatever Canadians eat besides doughnuts and poutine. Fox also name checks Labatt's and Molson in the lede. Okay, good jokes, and whoever wrote them surely felt pretty nifty when they survived editorial, but the article is in the SciTech category over at Fox.
Poorly done, but a terrific display of the kind of dismissive humor used to close off discussion of actual issues. |
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