Your money or your planet

Can a green agenda and economic growth ever go hand in hand? Failure at Copenhagen, and our own lifestlyles, suggest not

By Hugh Alderwick

What is more important, money, or the future of our planet? Apparently we can’t have both. According to a recent report from the New Economics Foundation think tank, if we continue to strive for economic growth, then the prospects for future and sustained ecological survival are bleak; instead of celebrating our current, admittedly modest, economic recovery, we should in fact be lamenting the environmental impact of our culture of greed.

However, before we start mourning the inevitable loss of our planet, the Adam Smith Institute, in reaction to this report, gives us a very different, antithetical message; that this very economic growth is helping to reduce inequality, whilst improving living and environmental standards across the world. According to Tom Clougherty, the executive director of the Adam Smith Institute, the NEF report simply shows that they “want us to be poorer and to lead more restricted lives for the sake of their faddish beliefs.”
How very confusing. We are faced with a pretty impossible dilemma then. Either we continue to embrace economic growth and potentially push our planet past the point of no return, or we try and reverse our economic assumption that bigger is better, rejecting the positive effects of economic development whilst dramatically changing our lifestyles and the way that we interact.
Your money or your planet; are you sure that we can’t ha

ve both?
Here we are clearly presented with two extreme points of view, based around differing perspectives of the free market in relation to the environment. Yet this conflict of opinion highlights an interesting question; are we willing to go further than our recycle bins to combat climate change? As a society, there seems to be a massive void between what we idealistically believe should be done about the environment, and what we are actually willing to do. ‘Green issues’ have become a political cliché, attempting to represent a modern environmentally aware society. Yet in reality, our attitude is encapsulated by Mr Cameron’s green actions, cycling to work, but only with our car following slightly behind. Middle class guilt may mean that we make sure that we buy fair-trade products, or that we remember not to keep our televisions on standby, but alongside these minute gestures, we are not willing to change our material and societal aspirations for wealth. Our lifestyle choices, which drive economic growth, are incompatible with our idealistic green views. We simply don’t care as much as we should, or as much as we think we ought to. We know that the environment is paying for our consumption, yet society’s greed does not align with any sort of radical green agenda as forwarded by the NEF.
And they aren’t even that radical. Ultra radical Deep ecologists for example, suggest that to protect our planet, we need to not only reverse the trend of an ever-­­­growing economy, but should reverse the trend of an ever growing human race. If we weren’t already uncertain about parting with our money, our lives seems like a pretty big leap.
It’s not that our human nature makes us inherently greedy and selfish, or that we want to forward an environmentally damaging agenda, it just seems that our environmental consciousness is wholly paradoxical. Maybe the mammoth task of saving our environment is simply too overwhelming for an individual to attempt to conquer on their own – do we need proper legislative measures imposed from above, like countries and their carbon emission targets? Or is it almost better to leave the recycle bin empty, before we are drawn into trading in our cars and setting up self-sufficient communes in our gardens. Radical approaches just won’t become reality, even though we know that if we are really going to take tackling climate change seriously, we need to go further than we are at the moment.
We care about the future of our planet, and any small-scale individual efforts to help combat growing environmental issues will clearly have some sort of positive effect, but a radical breakthrough, either socially or politically, in the way that we deal with these issues is not close at hand. Copenhagen showed us that, and so does the fact that we don’t seem willing to reject economic growth any time soon.