I'm going to miss Matthew Good

I'm going to miss Matthew Good.

For those who aren't part of Generation X, Good is a Vancouver pop star, scheduled to come out with a new album later this month. But Monday on his Facebook page, he made a stunning announcement: He is against electricity.

You know, as in the thing that powers the stereos that play his music and the spotlights that shine in his concerts. Oh, and that runs Facebook, on which he made his announcement.

"The world functioned prior to the advent of power," he announced. "In fact, it did so incredibly well for millennia."

He has been thinking a lot about electricity since he read Japanese nuclear reactors were damaged by the recent earthquake.

Good criticizes nuclear power. And oil too. So after one of his patented rants, he came up with his own proposal for electricity: "None of them."

"I'm a fan of candle light," he declared. "What can I say -- candles don't burn for 300 years whilst encased in concrete with the ability to cause cancer if the concrete cracks."

This is what passes for deep thought in show business.

Like so many of Canada's beautiful people, Good fashions himself an environmentalist. And so, while the Japanese tragedy unfolds, and many thousands of dead have yet to be buried, Good felt it appropriate to weigh in on the evils of nuclear power.

There are some show business types who actually live their creed. Quirky actor Ed Begley Jr. is one of them. He lives in a small house by Hollywood standards, uses an exercise bike to power his toaster, and putts around in electric go-karts. It's a bizarre, inefficient and impractical lifestyle, which is why only an eccentric millionaire can afford to do it. But at least, unlike Good, he's practising what he preaches.

For Matthew Good to rail against electricity is about as credible as Charlie Sheen doing a public service announcement telling kids to lay off drugs.

Good's website's home page is a gorgeous photo of a concert stage -- bathed in dazzling spotlights. His blog details the dozens of cities he has travelled to for concerts. The man has the carbon footprint of a small village. Yet he condemns electrical power.

Good's fatuous claims about mankind's glorious past before electricity aren't just a jarring contrast to his own high-powered lifestyle. They're also factually false.

Before electricity, mankind's state of affairs was bleak. Life expectancy 200 years ago was just 35. Good is 39 years old and should think about that.

Life wasn't just shorter. It was brutal, and grindingly poor. It's not hard to imagine. Just look at those parts of the world today without power -- over a billion people have to cook their dinners on an open flame. There's not a lot of room for pop music in the world's most excruciatingly poor countries. They're too busy trying to survive.

It must be tough for pop stars to reconcile their hedonistic, materialistic, high-carbon lifestyles with liberal cliches like "reduce, reuse and recycle."

Other showbiz types such as Al Gore and James Cameron just bluff it out, and hope we're too starstruck to notice the chasm between what they preach and what they practise.

Maybe Good will prove his skeptics wrong. Let's see if his album will be called: "Matthew Good Unplugged" -- a live album from Pyongyang.