The Passion of Ed Begley Jr. — Hollywood's Go-To Green Guru

As season two of his reality show 'Living With Ed' comes to an end, the actor and activist talks to Tonic about the roots of his never-ending green streak.

Ed Begley Jr. is just as famous these days for being an environmentalist as he is being an actor.

Everywhere he goes, he says, "People ask me, 'Ed are you Carbon Neutral?' I say, 'No, I'm not.' They say, 'What?! I'm disappointed. I thought a guy like you would be carbon neutral.'"

Then comes the punchline:  "No," he tells them. "I'm carbon negative."

"I've owned a windmill since 1985, and it's still profitable today," Hollywood's go-to green guru tells Tonic. "I own a share of a wind farm putting out many homes worth of power. That's 25 years of more than mitigating my use. And then you've got the solar panels on the roof. And when I must fly — I try to not fly — but when I must I buy a TerraPass carbon offset...."

Heck, Begley even rides a specially-rigged stationary bike every morning in order to self-produce enough electricity to make toast.

Living With Ed, the reality series all about what it's like to live with a guy so hell-bent on saving the earth, which stars Begley and his oh-so-patient wife, Rachelle Carson, wraps up its second season tonight on Planet Green (9 p.m. EST/PST).

We here at Tonic thought the season finale was a perfect excuse to catch up with Begley, one-on-one, to get to the roots of his green streak.

"I started doing it in 1970, and now I've been doing it for so long, people come to me for advice on it," he says. "They want to avoid some of the pitfalls that I certainly encountered in these 40 years, and I'm happy to share this information."

The inspiration to go Green was simple: "It was growing up in smoggy LA," Begley says. "It was such a negative influence, living in that smog for two decades, the '50s and '60s. Finally by 1970, Earth Day came along and said, ‘We gotta clean up the smog!' It was like, ‘Hell yeah!'"

Begley started recycling, composting, and buying biodegradable soaps and detergents way back then. "I became a vegetarian," he adds. "I even bought an electric car! A Taylor-Dunn. They make basically golf carts, but I got around the valley in this California license plate electric car with a windshield wiper and a horn, basically."

Beyond the smog mitigation, Begley found another very good reason to go green: "I was broke in 1970," he says. "I couldn't afford to pay much for anything, and I payed $950 for [the Taylor Dunn], and quickly learned that it was cheaper. It was cheaper to plug it in the wall than to buy 1970s gasoline. And there's literally no, I mean zero maintenance. You just put water in the batteries, which cost me nothing. No tune up or oil change, no radiator, no fan belt. It was just a cheap car — so I stayed with it."

Which gets us to another strong influence on the way he lives his life. "I behaved in a fiscally responsible manner, which I got from my conservative republican father," he says. "He died a few days before the first Earth Day in 1970, and I wanted to do something to honor him. He never used the word 'environmentalist,' but he was one. He turned off the lights, turned off the water, saved string and tinfoil. He was the son of Irish immigrants, lived through the depression."

"So it was not a big leap for me to becoame Ed the envorinmnetalist. I was doing a lot of that already," Begley tells Tonic.

Being a Boy Scout helped, too. "That was another good influence — to see nature up close and personal in scouting. I had a great deal of love of nature because of scouting," he says. "Those were the influences, but saving money kept me coming back."

Saving money can certainly be a big motivator, and Begley uses that factor to motivate people to go green when he's out doing speaking engagements as an enviromental expert.

"My water bill is much lower because of the rain barrels [at my house]. And I went to the next level. I invested in a subterranean rain cistern system, which not only collects rainwater in a 550-gallon tank, but collects filtered gray water from my house. So I have a lot of [free] water for irrigation," he says.

With all he's done, Begley has not quite made it off the grid. "Even when I was single I'd use about $100 in power a year, ‘cause there's a lot of shading October through March. I have a single-story house, and my neighbors have a second story. So I get a lot of shading," he says, which makes the solar panels on his roof less than perfectly efficient.

Plus, as driven as he is to be green at all times, he's also a married man — and a realist.

"When you get married and have more people [in the house], there are different temperature requirements. I used to keep it 68-degrees in the winter and 78-degrees in the summer. That ain't gonna fly anymore. My wife has different temperature requirements, and God bless her. It's a family. You've got to keep everybody happy. And she has things I'd never heard of, called blowdryers and curling irons — it's a different world," he says with a laugh.

"Even with all of that, and even with shooting a television show, having news crews in the house all the time with bright lights, I'm basically running a mini-TV studio in my house; and charging an electric vehicle, and running a house for three people — that, all-in, costs about $800 a year."

Wasteful? No way. Begley belongs to the LA department of power's Greenpower program, so the power he uses is purchased entirely from wind, solar, and geothermal energy. "The energy I purchase is basically as clean as the energy I generate from my roof," he says proudly. "It's a pretty green clean set-up."

TV Show Idea

Begley (seen here with his wife in a human-powered paddleboat) never imagined his green lifestyle would wind up being incorporated into a reality-TV show.

"When my wife came to me with this idea in 2006, I said, 'Honey, I don't want to do a reality show.'"

Rachelle explained that her idea was to show the world what it's like to live with a guy who's, well, an Ed Begley Jr. type. She convinced him to shoot a 10-minute presentation — and the film crew took 13 hours to film it. "For 10 minutes!!" he says. "I said, 'I don't want to do this. We're wasting our time. I don't want a crew to be around for that long.'"

But as soon as he saw the finished presentation, and realized how funny he and his wife were together, he was sold.

"I had other 'green' shows before and they were on at 4 in the morning," he says. "Today's Environment on Discovery Channel. It was a nice show, but not very entertaining. ‘Hi, Ed Begley here. This washer will save you 125 gallons a year on a leaky faucet.' ‘Here's another company that's saving water and protecting the environment!'"

He makes a loud snoring sound — acknowledging that preaching good doesn't necessarily work.

"Now we have this thing of getting people into the tent with ‘infotainment,' with Rachelle and I and our very real way that we deal with each other, and so people tuned in, and now tens of thousands of people are trying these things — the lightbulbs and the rain barrels and the solar ovens and energy efficient thermostats. We've reached more people. We got ‘em into the tent with entertainment, and we've got ‘em leaving the tent and going and buying something that is great. It's a success — and God bless her for coming up with the idea."

What's Next?
After Wednesday night's finale, the network has an option to pick up the show — "If we have the stomach for another season," he says, not unaware of how many couples have suffered the reality-TV break-up curse. "If we've weathered these past three seasons, we can do anything, Rachelle and I," he adds. "I love her and she loves me. We have a lot of laughs. Nobody holds anything in — we vent our differences right away and thereby diffuse it. So we're doing good. And if they do more shows, fine. But I'm very happy to keep acting."

Since his breakout role on TV's St. Elsewhere, he's never stopped. Just witness recent turns on The New Adventures of Old Christine, his hilarious ads for Direct TV and the Census (directed by Christopher Guest), or his role in Woody Allen's Whatever Works with Larry David, which just came out on DVD.

"I'll work 'til I retire," Begley says, "and I'm not interested in retiring."

He'll also continue speaking publicly, all over the country, in his role as environmental activist.

"I love it. People really respond. Red-state, blue-state people. There are many people out there who disagree about climate change. I say, ‘Fine. Lets agree to disagree. But do you want to clean up the air in Houston? Do you want us less dependent on Mid-East oil? Do you want to put more money in your pocket?' People usually say yes to that, so then we have some common ground and [I say], 'Let's work to do those three things.'"

Looking back at the example of his own life, from the lessons learned from his father, to buying that first electric car, to taking ownership in a windfarm and spreading the Green word on TV, he says, "We can do this. We've just got to all pull together and do the stuff that makes economic sense."

Photos courtesy Planet Green