Rainy Week at the Seaside Anyone?

I keep coming back to this rather gloomy thought: many people still think that Greens want to take the fun out of their lives. Too many Green scribblers seem to take pleasure in the thought that our civilisation is on the verge of collapse. They love to tell us that unless we stop doing everything we like RIGHT NOW the sky's going to fall on our head.

Maybe this is true. Maybe we're all doomed. Ho hum.

Greens aren't the only ones who think like this. There are people holed up in cabins in America waiting confidently for the world to end. We think they're crazy, but that we're right. As I said, maybe we are, but why bother being Green and talking about these things if you don't have anything positive to add to the human experience?

Too often activists try to sell the Green message as if they were selling the world's worst holiday. Come and have a week in the rain, in Weston-super-Mare, with the tide out all the time! I think the Transition Man says this in his handbook, that we have to offer people a vision of something better than they have now - a sunny week in Weston, maybe, with the tide in.

Here's a great example: my kids' primary school is on the edge of a lovely city park, but until recently the playground was the traditional expanse of tarmac - easy to maintain and unlikely to make anyone muddy. Then some Greenish parents got together and dug up a corner and planted a funky little willow tunnel and some little bushes. It really isn't an Eco-anything, but it's a patch of non-tarmac and the kids love it. They play in it is if it were an enchanted wood.

There was a story in America recently about an insurance company cancelling an advert that showed a man forced to ride a bike because petrol (gas) was too expensive. Basically all the joy had gone out of this guy's life because he couldn't drive. Lots of Greens protested about this and the ad disappeared. BUT THE ATTITUDE HASN'T. Most people still think that bike-riding is a stage of growing-up between riding a scooter and driving. They will do anything to keep their car on the road, even if it means turning all the world's food into Biofuels. Yet riding a bike is usually much more fun than driving. You get the buzz of exercise, the thrill of zooming about, and in most cities these days you get where you're going quicker than you do in a car.

How to change the attitude, though, that's the question.

Coconut Jet Fuel and the Icarus Moment

The idea of a plane powered by coconuts sounds quite funny, but when I read about this in the papers the other day it didn't make me laugh. Instead it made me think of Icarus, the unfortunate flying boy. He tried to fly too high and melted his wings, confirming the view that people ought to stay put on terra firma and not act like gods. The Greeks had a word for this sort of behaviour: Hubris. In their myths people who put on airs and graces were guilty of hubris and generally came to a sticky end. Prometheus is another example.

Cut to 2008 and people are concerned about the environmental impact of cars and planes. We want to go wherever we want quickly, but oil is getting more expensive and our journeys are releasing ever-increasing amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. I don't claim to be an expert Carbon-cruncher, but wiser heads have pointed out that carbon released high in the atmosphere causes more trouble than the same amount released at ground level. Yes, we're back with Icarus...

Airlines are attracting more and more customers but they're not enjoying the bad publicity. So a certain British businessman, who owns an airline, hit on the idea of putting biofuel in the gas tanks of a 747. Of the jet's four tanks, three contained ordinary jet fuel, while the last had a mixture of 80% jet fuel and 20% fuel made from coconut and babassu palm oil. Apparently 150,000 coconuts were used, along with an unspecified amount of palm oil. I'm no mathematician, but that sounds like an awful lot of coconuts to provide a small percentage of one airplane's fuel.

The entrepreneur in question described the flight as 'historic', and perhaps it is. Perhaps this was the moment when the human race finally took leave of its senses. The Icarus moment.

Biofuels are made from living plants, which absorb carbon as they grow. The idea is that, on balance, a car or jet running on biofuel emits less carbon than one using ordinary fuel. Groans point to this and say, Here is the future of transport! And that future is bright leafy Green!

What they never mention is that all these plants - oil palms, rape, wheat - have to grow somewhere. Land which might have been used to grow food or left alone for wildlife has to be cleared and planted with biofuel crops. These are not cosy little farms but vast plantations run by big companies that want to make as much money as they can - what they do is called Green because people have this obsession with carbon, but isn't even remotely Green. It's hugely destructive. Oil palms grow in the tropics, which means rainforest is being cut down and burned to make way for them. The oran utang is losing its home so that people in Europe can put biofuels in their petrol tanks and feel all virtuous and Green.

And now people want to power jets with coconuts! This isn't Green, this is Gruesome, Grisly Groanishness of the first order. It's unbelievably stupid. By contrast, Icarus was just a kid who forgot where he was.

What does Green mean?

It's a tricky one, isn't it? We're always telling each other we should be Greener, but does anyone really know what this means? I have an idea in my head, but I doubt it's the same as yours. For instance, my Green vision isn't limited to worrying about Carbon. I'm not sure that all our attention should be focused so narrowly on this one element, because it allows accountants and technical people and marketing whizzkids to dictate how we think about changing the world for the better.

If you're obsessed with Carbon you can't think rationally about nuclear power or dams across the Severn. Of course this suits big corporations just fine, because a thinking public is not good for business. After all, if you think in broad terms about being Green you soon realise that the most important Green qualities are THRIFT (ie not wasting stuff), MODERATION (ie not consuming too much), SELF-RELIANCE (ie doing things for yourself) and CRAFT (ie making and doing things rather than passively consuming them). If you have these qualities you will have a small Carbon footprint. You will have lower Carbon emissions than other people. You won't need to waste any of your precious time thinking about this incredibly tedious subject.

But can you think of a business that wants its customers to be thrifty, moderate, self-reliant and crafty? What about the government? Our leaders want us to be healthy and reasonably content, but they also want us to consume. They want us to buy a lot of everything. For the economy to keep booming we have to buy more this year than we did last, and if we're Green we won't.

Carbon is a good get-out for government and business. Think about it. If you're a business person you want people to keep buying stuff, but there's only so much a person can buy. So you keep creating new products and new markets, and this is what's happening with Carbon. Instead of buying less, people are buying more, only they're buying stuff that seems to be Green because it involves less Carbon floating about the place. Biofuel is a classic example of this, as discussed in How To Turn Your Parents Green:

Don’t be Fooled by BioFuel
Car owners, manufacturers and petrol companies are always looking for ways to seem Green, and biofuels are the New Big Thing. Instead of powering cars with the energy from long-dead plants (ie oil), biofuels are made from plants grown for the purpose – crops like wheat, oilseed rape and oil palms. The idea is that the growing plants consume as much CO2 as the car engines will emit, but does this make biofuels Green? Not in the slightest. So how can you be a Green driver? By riding a bike instead

Don't get me wrong. I'm nervous about Global Warming and I know that we need to change our ways. But when you're thinking Green, have some imagination. Have some vision. Conjure a great life. The future needs hard-working, thoughtful, creative people, not a bunch of Carbon-crunchers.