The Gang of Two

At first glance the video podcast looks like yet another example of YouTube-inspired absurdity. A bespectacled white guy is standing in a field, rapping in Mandarin as his Chinese counterpart earnestly recites a poem. The men gesture wildly. They run their fingers through their hair. Ne-ext.

But wait: those are wind turbines in the background. And the clip's English subtitles suggest a goal beyond generating clicks. "Wind energy, hey! Reduce energy, hey! It's green energy, hey-hey-hey!" This 50-megawatt wind farm, we learn, helps power Beijing's economic boom.

The would-be poets are John Romankiewicz, a New Jersey transplant to Beijing, and Zhao Xiangyu (aka Shane), a student from Heilongjiang province. To their fans, though, they're known simply as lüse xiongdi, or the Green Brothers.

Romankiewicz, 24, became interested in renewable energy while an undergraduate at Northwestern. He moved to Beijing after graduation and enrolled in an intensive Mandarin course. He met Zhao, 20, while tutoring him in English and found they shared an interest in environmental issues.

A few months later, they were roommates with a green game plan: video podcasts touching on topics ranging from public transportation to biomass. (They considered blogging, but, as Romankiewicz explains, "That's so last year.") Romankiewicz won a Fulbright grant that paid for a handheld video camera and a Web site, chinasgreenbeat.com. But their approach is decidedly low-budget, splicing upbeat narration with comedic skits and "eco-rap."

The Green Brothers' first episode featured Beijing's ubiquitous bicycle carts, which often carry towering mounds of recyclables. They tracked the carts from Tsinghua University to rundown lots where workers sort through the contents for a few dollars a day. In one scrapyard, Zhao interviews a tattered-looking worker as a truck unloads shreds of metal onto a sprawling pile. The man tells Zhao, who is clad in a Ghostbusters T-shirt, that he works only 10 hours a day -- a "good" job. "Do you think your job relates to environmental protection?" Zhao presses. "I don't know," the worker says.

The same pointed message comes through in an episode on solar power. For now, if people in China are practicing conservation, it is for strictly economic reasons. In the city of Rizhao, 10 percent of Chinese use solar water heaters. The reason? They save money.

The Green Brothers have experienced China's environmental problems firsthand. Zhao is from a coal mining town. Romankiewicz calls his adopted city Grayjing. But their goal is to inspire, not depress. "We want to make people feel they have a responsibility to go out and do something," Romankiewicz says. To that end, he adds, "we need to make them laugh."

The Green Brothers' efforts are spawning other leaders. The two have tapped into China's thousands of green youth groups to build a network of like-minded activists, including a number of "green sisters." In April the British environmental site China Dialogue funded 30 young people to attend a Green Brothers video-making seminar in Beijing.

This fall, Zhao will be a freshman at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania, while Romankiewicz starts a day job as a clean-energy investment analyst in Beijing. But the brothers don't plan on slowing down. They recently enlisted a third brother, Canadian theater activist Rene Ng, and their offerings are as whimsical as ever. One recent episode on green dating starred a hot bicycle-riding vegetarian.

They're already slipping in pointers for the carbon-intensive West. At the end of the solar episode, Romankiewicz urges Americans to push Congress to support solar technology. He admits it's a funny sight -- an American addressing other Americans in Chinese. But he's dead serious. The water heaters are "not that expensive," he says. "So why isn't the U.S. on top of this?"