As an engineer, I find a lot of the environmentalism stuff to be impractical, and ultimately ineffective. It's not that the "idea" is bad, but it's just that people are often unaware of real world limitations.
I work as a facilities engineer, and one of my duties, is to track utility consumption at our different hospitals/clinics. For example, a hospital might use say 1,000,000 KW/hrs a month, which is about the same as say 100 homes. I've had people try to bring up implementing all different types of "green" technologies, but most of it is bullshit. The technology just isn't mature/cheap enough to be used regardless of what many proponents/environmentalists might think.
For example, boiler technology(which is the way that you heat a large a building/provide hot water), is a technology that is 200 years old. It's understood thoroughly, and you can reliably run a boiler for over 50 years provided it's cared for. Also that boiler(especially like a hot water boiler, which is a massively scaled up hot water heater) has like a thermodynamic efficiency of like 90+%, so even if you're using natural gas to boil the water, you're getting an economy of scale that you can't yet achieve using alternative energy sources and you're getting almost every last bit of heat squeezed out of the natural gas when you burn it.
There are environmental things that we've pushed, but they're always grounded in economic/practical reality. For example, the maintenance budget we've got to work with, is really limited, so for us we're trying to get equipment that's really reliable so that our limited maintenance guys can keep up with stuff breaking down. Secondly, we don't want anything too sophisticated, because then we'd need to fork over a ton of money for training, and until we had our guys up to speed, we'd be screwed if something broke.
However, a lot of "waste minimization" types of policies are regularly implemented. An example might be me roaming around a hospital with a thermal imaging camera trying to locate air leaks. It's a lot cheaper to have the guys fix window sills, than to invest a million dollars in a state of the art boiler system. It's better return for us to put down a 100 grand on some quality insulation around our steam pipes/hot water, than to invest in solar panels.
I'm an environmentalist because it's a good way to try to make the most of the funding we get from the federal government. It's in our best interest to reduce waste (be it excessive man hours being dumped on old equipment, huge utility bills, degrading buildings, etc.), but things need to happen gradually.
