Feel like letting go
Want to make money and be green? Drop the bucket
Thursday, December 08 2011 || The Slack Page || BY David Slack
I’m at the launch of the Pure Advantage ‘green growth’ campaign in Auckland, reflecting on the rhetorical challenges of green advocacy. I’m casting my mind back.
It would have been 1989 that I first wrote a speech about climate change. My boss was the Minister for the Environment. In the ensuing two decades I have written and watched other people write endless variations on the same fundamental proposition: “We really need to fix this and you there in the third row texting your girlfriend, that includes you”.
Two decades later it’s not so heartening to consider what effect any of those words have had. People do care more about the fate of the planet and they’re more aware of the change that’s needed. But talk is cheap.
What happens when push comes to shove? I once teetered at the top of some scaffolding, painting our house. I had opened a new 10-litre paint pail, I had climbed back up and I had hoisted myself over the bar. The balance was all wrong and I held there for a long moment in open air like Wile E Coyote. I could either let go of the pail and lose 10 litres of paint or I could go down hanging on to the bucket and break my back.
The paint had cost me about $120. Decisions, decisions. I finally, reluctantly, let go of the bucket. The paint went everywhere. We seem to come at our green choices the same way. We can’t drop the bucket — the paint cost $120.
Perhaps we might respond to a fresh approach. The Pure Advantage message is clear. The website declares, “Green growth is worth $6 trillion per year worldwide. New Zealand’s green reputation gives us a head start in this business. Shame we’re not really in the race.”
They warn us we’re eroding our ‘100% Pure’ image, putting the tourism and export industries at risk.
They exhort us to “break out of our short sighted commodity attitude and embrace our competitive advantage in being green.” There’s no coyness in the message. It’s a huge business opportunity. What on earth are we waiting for?
I admire the technique and concept. The vinegar hasn’t had much effect. Let’s try the honey.
There are doubters. Sue Bradford made her case on the Pundit website. Capitalism is predicated on growth and ever greater profits, she argued. Offering green business as a carrot for all those capitalist donkeys could only perpetuate our problem.
But is growth inevitably bad? Granted, we have finite supplies of food, energy and resources. If we draw too heavily on them then of course our problem is dire. But if we find a way to make a finite resource go further, how have we failed? Is that not the kind of sustainability we might all benefit from? Is this not something the Pure Advantage approach might nurture?
Not all business gatherings are the same; not all people in business are alike. After an unvaried diet in recent years of venal finance company executives and bankers and assorted Murdochs, a person could be forgiven some skepticism. But genuine business innovators can come from a very different mould. Striving to do good need not conflict with making some money.
For those prepared to try capitalism as the solution, the large question is, where do we go next? The Pure Advantage people have put up the idea. Now they want to put some flesh on the bones. What can be done and where are the opportunities? One obvious answer suggests itself. Turn back through the pages of this publication. It’s full of leads. Tell your friends. Yes, you saw what I did there. Commercial hard sell and cause campaigning bound up together. It’s not a bad thing.
Mostly I look at what we’re doing to fix our mistakes and I conclude that nothing much will change before petrol hits four dollars a litre.
But this Pure Advantage strategy offers a brighter picture. It offers a reward, it addresses environmental problems and it also addresses another: we’re getting poorer.
A man visits a fortune teller. She tells him, “You’ll have 20 years of misery.”
Silence. He waits for her to continue. Finally he asks, “And then what?” She tells him, “You’ll get used to it.”
Misery seems a meagre legacy for our kids. We really should let go of the bucket.
>Mostly I look at what we're doing to fix our mistakes and I conclude that nothing much will change before petrol hits four dollars a litre.
Interestingly, that was around the exact price that I worked out I could make my own biofuel for. Just from the retail price of sugar. It must be cheaper than that when made industrially, by quite a margin. That has to put an upper limit on the price of oil?
Posted by Ben Wilson at 03:50 on December 8, 2011
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