Comedian Greg Shapiro is attempting to go green and give Putin what for at the same time.

Welcome to my new Green Blog. I’m committing myself to writing about Green Nederland. Sometimes the Dutch are pioneers of sustainability; sometimes they’re total slackers.

Disclaimer: I’m from America. We invented sustainability slacking. Feel free to take everything I say with a grain of salt. Or a lump of coal. Or the US Congressman, who argued that wind turbines ‘would make the winds slow down, which would cause the temperature to go up’. (He’s from Texas.)

http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=87390

This week, Dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk posted an interesting link: Russia sends about 76% of its natural gas exports to customers in Western Europe.

http://www.eia.gov/countries/cab.cfm?fips=rs

So it’s interesting to note that – while many of us Western Europeans are outraged at Putin’s Crimean adventures – we are in fact subsidising him.

But surely the sustainable Netherlands aren’t so dependent upon Russian resources? Well, yes… But surely, Den Haag has a plan for energy independence? Well, we used to… But surely some Dutch energy bosses are at least paying lip service to some sustainable-friendly soundbites?

Judge for yourself. This week the Dutch director of energy firm RWE (Essent) was on NOS news saying ‘energy is like a fine wine. We import wine from other countries. Why not energy?’ In other words, ‘Keep it coming, Vlad!’

If you’re like me, your reaction is: ‘Well, yeah. But what am I supposed to do about it?’ Well, for one thing, turn down the heat. Why wait for the EU sanctions to kick in, when you could start right now? Take advantage of the warmest winter ever, turn down the thermostat and sock it to the Man. I hate to sound like a 70’s era president, but ‘put on a sweater.’ And give yourself a hug.

This all sounded good, until we actually tried it. My wife and I found ourselves doing a home renovation recently, and I was all about energy efficiency. We ripped out the old heating system and put in ‘vloerverwarming’ so that the heat rises right up out of the floor. Efficient! Take that, Vladimir.

BUT as it turns out, our heating/electricity bills were higher than before. And not by a little. They’d almost doubled.

We had the contractor come back to check. We had the electrician come back to check. We had the plumber as well. He said that – since installing the new heating system – someone forgot to put a valve in, and the old water heater was constantly on for no reason. It was just burning those little blue flames from – I’m guessing – natural gas.

Hundreds of euros per year wasted. And a whole lot of natural gas burned. It’s like – instead of protesting Russia – we’d lit an honorary eternal flame.

Perhaps next we should install glass walls to our house so I can continue throwing stones.

Greg Shapiro is a comedian and author of the book ‘How to Be Orange.’ The new show he’s developing is called ‘Part-Time Hypocrite.‘