green102

Green 102

Overview

What follows is the text of a short movie (Oh My Newsnight) I made and uploaded onto YouTube. The video can be viewed through the kiosk below. However, you may need to keep the mouse moving for the feed to progress! Alternatively, you can visit my YouTube channel, which is called, rather prosaically, PGHughes

Perhaps unlike BBC Newsnight’s own ‘Ethical Man’, Justin Rowlatt, I arrive with good Green credentials:

• I am a former card-carrying member of the Ecology Party;

• I volunteered for a few years in a Friends of the Earth shop, and have devised and delivered environmental workshops;

• I was an early convert to anti-nuclear, and an early believer in global warming;

• I am a long-standing ferocious recycler, compost maker and strict vegan.

• And, yes, I do have a beard, wear sandals and bake my own bread.

However, I have been starting to have doubts. Not about the facts or about truth, but about how to bring about change: small may be highly attractive, but is it enough?

Take energy-saving light bulbs, for example. To the committed environmentalist they are a good idea regardless of their price in the shops. Energy-saving light bulbs, as well as saving the planet, have always been marketed on the basis that they will save you money in the long-term. The arithmetic ought to be compelling. However, paying a pound or two for one light bulb will never have the same appeal as paying a pound for four cheap light bulbs from Tescos. Cheap, incandescent light bulbs may be more expensive to run compared with their fluorescent counterparts, but they are much, much cheaper to buy. Until fluorescent light bulbs are actually cheaper to buy than incandescent bulbs, or until the incandescent variety are outlawed, inviting the majority of people to save small amounts of money over a year or two by spending much more now will never work. Only government legislation can cure this ill.

Or take another example: cheap air travel. Justin Rowlatt was given grief over his trip to Jamaica, but how many people would willingly forego a trip to Jamaica, or New York, or Barcelona, in order to ‘save the planet’ by a miniscule fraction of a tiny percentage. I am one of those people who have discovered Manhattan, Miami and Malaga solely because flights that used to be expensive are now cheap. I am not eager to abandon these new-found pleasures.

The issue deepens when I think about the kind of world (or country) in which I wish to live. I like a lot that ordinary people now expect to move around the world. Forty years ago half my family set sail for a new life in Canada, and I never saw them again for thirty years. Now we can afford to visit each other every couple of years. That is the kind of world in which I wish to live. At what price? If the production of environmentally-friendlier bio-kerosene is required to keep it happening, then make it so.

However, I can’t grow, refine and distribute bio-kerosene. Neither will the planet be saved by me composting my potato peelings and powering off the stand-by. The doubts to which I confessed earlier arise from the realisation that our planet is not in my hands, nor even in the collective hands of cyclists, recyclers, composters and environmental eco-warriors, but in the hands of local, national and supra-national governments. Maybe the inhabitants of Polperro, Plymouth and Perth and have already realised this, or at least sensed their own impotence.

I like the prospect of having a wind-turbine in my garden, and solar panels on the roof, but towns, cities and industry have to be powered by industrial-sized wind farms. I like the idea of running my car on used chip fat, but public transport requires a bio-diesel infrastructure. I love the idea of using public transport to commute to and from work, but government money would be required to extend the Tyne & Wear Metro a further fifteen miles to my village in order to transform the idea into a reality.

I guess that my personal efforts are gestures to show willing. I guess that a sizeable proportion of the UK population could be temporarily spooked or terrorised into accepting necessary change, although the fuel protests of a few years ago calls even that into question. But what about the developing economies of China, India, Brazil, and of course, the U.S? If my puny efforts are the flea on an elephant’s back in the UK, what is their worth in a world of six and a half billion?

This is why I am having doubts.