Green Gone Wrong. Heather Rogers
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a fact of life, and growing numbers of people were looking for solutions. A news broadcast from that year, a midday edition of CNN International, typified the emerging state of affairs. The lead story featured an intrepid but well-coiffed reporter exploring catastrophic ice loss at the north pole. Visually incongruous with the blank, undulating landscape, the perky newswoman explained that temperatures were climbing faster in arctic regions than elsewhere on the planet, and at a more rapid clip than previously thought. The latest projections, she reported, said summer ice may be extinct as soon as 2040, taking several animal species with it. The follow-up segment on CNN that day was what Wal-Mart—the biggest retailer on the planet—was doing to address ecological degradation. In addition to reducing energy consumption in its stores and using more fuel-efficient trucks, the company committed to push its 180 million customers to buy more commodities it deemed helpful to the environment. As this example suggests, the dire and depressing problem of climate crisis is increasingly being answered by the next phase of environmentalism: the buying and selling of ecologically responsible products.
Not so long ago wheat germ, solar panels, and electric minicars were the purview of activists, hippies, and renegade engineers. Recently, however, a rush of fashionable responses to ecological meltdown has crowded out the previous generation’s reaction—often characterized as strident and blaming. The new green wave, typified by the phrase lazy environmentalism, is geared toward the masses that aren’t willing to sacrifice. This brand of armchair activism actualizes itself most fully in the realm of consumer goods; through buying the right products we can usher our economic system into the environmental age. The new naturalists don’t reject the free market for its reckless degradation of the air, water, and soil as their forebears did. Instead they aspire to turn the forces of economic growth and development away from despoliation and toward regeneration. Couched in optimism that springs from avoiding conflict, the current approach asks why taking care of ecosystems must entail a Spartan doing without when saving the planet can be fun and relatively easy.
Over the past several years green has gone from just a color to indicating that something possesses what’s needed to protect the earth’s natural systems. Green is now used as a modifier to differentiate products that are healthier for the planet: green cars, green architecture, green fashion, green investing, green energy. The word has also become a verb: we can now green our homes, cars, and even our lives. Indeed green goods have become all the rage. In the decade leading up to the economic crash of 2008–9, eco-products conquered the market. Whole Foods, the all-natural grocery store chain, turned into a Wall Street darling, while such food manufacturing giants as General Mills, Kraft, and Unilever began offering organic goods. And Wal-Mart set out to make itself into a top vendor of organic groceries. During that time the organic-foods industry expanded by double digits each year, far outstripping conventional food, which remained stalled at less than 3 percent annual growth. Homebuyers’ and commercial developers’ demand for ecologically astute architecture continues to spread even as the real estate market overall is still struggling through its grueling recovery. Often considered a badge of honor, and in some circles a status symbol, this method of design and construction using materials that promote energy efficiency, reduce polluting emissions, diminish natural-resource degradation, and encourage more eco-friendly living is now de rigueur in the industry.
In terms of automobiles, most major carmakers now offer gas-electric hybrid models, as well as vehicles that can run on biofuels. And both Toyota and General Motors are poised to mass-produce what might be the next generation of superefficient cars: plug-in gas-electric hybrids. Although it’s still unclear in what form the various auto firms will survive the industry’s drastic downturn, vehicles that are more ecologically sensible have become a must. On the transportation-fuels front, after three solid years of rapid expansion, biofuel production fell into disarray in 2009 with the plummeting price of oil and the collapsing economy. Nevertheless, Big Oil and Big Ag continue pushing for transportation fuels derived from plants. BP has claimed for itself the leadership position in eco-fuels even though its investment in biofuels was negligible until 2007. That year the company poured a half billion dollars into a controversial biofuels research center at the University of California, Berkeley, which works in partnership with a lab at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Since then BP has committed over $1.5 billion to various plant-based fuel ventures. Keeping drivers on a liquid diet via biofuels is preferable to the oil industry because it can curtail the switch to electric vehicles, which are juiced up by the competition: power plants. Coupled with ongoing mandates and subsidies in the United Kingdom, the European Union, the United States, Brazil, Indonesia, and parts of China, biofuels are clearly here to stay. More broadly, government support and funding for green-collar jobs, renewable power such as solar and wind, and energy-conservation measures promise to keep ecologically oriented industries growing. Without question a greater awareness of the environmental impacts of mass consumption is changing what’s for sale.
The promise implicit in these changes is that global warming can be stopped by swapping out dirty products for green ones, with little disruption to daily life. Getting behind the wheel of a gas-electric hybrid is not so different from driving a regular car. Ethanol and biodiesel come out the nozzle the same as ordinary petrol. Eating organic breakfast cereal no longer feels unfamiliar because it’s coated with sugar and comes in cartoon-covered boxes. And paying a little extra for an airline ticket to cancel out CO2 emissions from a flight takes almost no effort at all. One of the most popular current tools to counteract the mucking up of the earth is the reusable shopping bag. Nowadays more people are bringing them along to the store so they won’t need new plastic bags each time. These totes—often decorated with cheerful images of trees and animals, or sporting slogans like I AM NOT A PLASTIC BAG or I AM EARTH WISE—exemplify today’s popular environmentalism. There is good that comes from using them, but they are also symbols that convey responsibility while glossing over the more significant issues of what goes into those bags, how much, and how often.
MENDING OUR WAYS
For at least twenty years the captains of industry and their operatives, together with compliant politicians, have labored to cast doubt on the majority scientific opinion that global warming is under way. For over a century scientists have recognized carbon dioxide emissions from human activities as having a warming effect on the planet. Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist working at the turn of the last century, was the first to argue, in an 1896 report, that CO2 resulting from burning fossil fuels would cause global warming. Arrhenius, a prolific researcher (albeit a prominent eugenicist), and Sweden’s first Nobel Prize winner, considered higher temperatures desirable to fend off another ice age. During one of his lectures he mused, “We would then have some right to indulge in the pleasant belief that our descendants, albeit after many generations, might live under a milder sky and in less barren surroundings than is our lot at present.” Sixty years after the Swede’s death, James Hansen, an esteemed NASA climatologist, voiced his decidedly less rosy take on global warming as potentially highly destructive. In a dramatic episode, testifying before a Senate committee on a searingly hot summer day in 1988, Hansen told lawmakers that he believed with “ninety-nine percent confidence” that climate change was real and the world was heating up.
Today a majority of Americans agree that climate change is real despite the concerted efforts of the biggest polluters and their allies to revive doubt. This book takes as its starting point that these matters are settled—the conversation on global warming and other grave afflictions the natural world suffers must move forward. Part of the next step is a critical assessment of solutions to ecological crisis.
I started thinking about this book as I was doing talks for my last book, which was about garbage. Almost everywhere I spoke in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, at least one person in the audience would say he or she thought we could cure our environmental ills by consuming the right products. I began this project because I wasn’t sure the answer was so straightforward. Ultimately, I was concerned that the remedies being promoted in the marketplace may not have the power to keep biodiversity intact and the planet cool. The following pages take the reader into forests, fields, factories, and boardrooms around the world to draw out the unintended consequences, inherent obstacles, as well as successful methods, that lie beneath the surface of environmentally friendly products. I visited a different geographical location for each chapter to piece together a global picture of