SORRY GRETA, YOU’RE WRONG
Green targets are a good thing – we’re all environmentalists now, writes
HOW dare she! Greta Thunberg has questioned Nicola Sturgeon’s pretensions as a world leader on climate change. In a BBC interview she suggested the Scottish Government is all green PR and that climate targets are bogus. She’s still thinking of boycotting COP26.
Now, you may question Ms Sturgeon’s ability to deliver, but Greta is simply wrong here. Scotland’s legally binding target of net zero by 2045 is undoubtedly world-leading. It is ahead even of New Zealand. Moreover, the Scottish Government has repeatedly exceeded its emissions targets since it started setting them in 2009.
Environmental campaigners like Greta Thunberg have taken against emissions targets ostensibly because they are inadequate. But the real reason is that they’re working better than anyone could have imagined. When I started writing about climate change after the Rio Summit in 1992, the idea that the UK could reduce its greenhouse gases by half seemed fantasy. No one dared to suggest it, except a few superannuated hippies living in yurts. It implied, we thought, a transformation of our way of life comparable to the industrial revolution in reverse.
Well, 30 years on, Britain has halved its emissions below 1990 levels and somehow we haven’t reverted to agrarian feudalism.
The current government target of a 78 per cent reduction in emissions by 2035 is also eminently achievable, given the revolution in renewable energy and gains in industrial efficiency brought about by digital logistics. Net zero by 2050, or 2045 on the Scottish Government’s schedule, is also achievable.
This will be a milestone in our industrial civilisation, and it will require puzzlingly little in the way of painful changes to the western lifestyle. Just as it hasn’t over the last 30 years. This is partly because the western lifestyle is already way ahead of itself. We are all environmentalists now, thanks in part to brilliant publicists like Greta.
Green is good. The advertising industry has become a kind of green campaign organisation. Every Persil ad is a desperate appeal to be loved as an agent of ecological virtue and not loathed for bringing petro-chemical detergents into the world. All those property shows about eco-housing. No one loves factory farming, just look at supermarket shelves. The environmental movement has been engaged in a public relations war with corporate capitalism, which is stealing its clothes faster than it can knit them.
It’s 20 years since BP renamed itself “Beyond Petroleum”. Greens regard all that stuff as capitalist “greenwash” and in a sense they are right. I am particularly amused by banks like Goldman Sachs and BNP Paribas discovering that they are engines of green transition. But the Greens are wrong to think this doesn’t make a difference.
There is nothing synthetic about the trillions being invested now in green energy and infrastructure. The IMF estimates that somewhere short of $10 trillion will be invested in decarbonisation in the next 10 years alone – 6-10% of annual global GDP. Getting to net zero is capital-intensive – and that, like it or loathe it, means capitalism-intensive. Corporations have to be tamed and enlisted in this project just as they were in vaccine production.
Companies are going green, not because they are trying to fool people, but because they realise that it’s what customers want. Indeed, instead of extinguishing consumerism, environmentalism has itself become a new kind of consumerism – hyperconsumerism, even. This has disoriented old-style environmentalists who assumed that climate change was all about organic gardening, veganism and bicycles.
Actually, they were partly right, but only because veganism is now big business, promoted by the agri-industrial complex and marketed by retailers like Greggs. Electric bikes and scooters are now a huge industry and transforming urban transport. I can recall when solar panels were a joke. They are now massproduced in China and the unit price of solar power has fallen 90% in 10 years.
The public doesn’t need to be persuaded any more about environmentalism; it is government that can’t keep up. Anyone who has driven an electric car knows that they are superior in every way to dirty petrol and diesel vehicles. Yet owners in Scotland are in near despair at the failure of the charging infrastructure. Ask anyone who has an e-vehicle and they’ll tell you that they spend half their time looking for a charger that works. The Scottish Government is evidently trying to make the electrification of transport an even bigger mess than the ferries fiasco.
Similarly, there would be widespread support for imaginative measures like district heating and biomass to assist the transition from fossil fuel. No one loves gas boilers any more than the internal combustion engine. Heat pumps are being hotly promoted by companies like Scottish Power, but the Scottish Government could and should listen to its new Green ministers and think much bigger about home heating. Like wind turbines, big really is better: heating should be city-wide.
This remarkable cultural embrace of environmentalism is of course why the SNP – a hydrocarbon party if ever there was one – has enlisted the Scottish Green Party to retrofit its environmental credentials pre-cop26. Ms Sturgeon senses that there is going to be a rammy in November and she wants to be on the right side. The entire political class is going green.
Boris Johnson is a COP26 bore who can’t stop talking about Giga factories, electric buses and biodiversity. He knows that carbon is the new political kryptonite and is trying to persuade antediluvian Tory backbenchers that green is the new capitalism.
Tony Blair has weighed in with his own assessment of the road to net zero. Like the US climate ambassador John Kerry, he sees it as being largely market-led, though orchestrated by government involvement through taxation, carbon-pricing and subsidies.
Of course, more needs to be done. Greta Thunberg is right that keeping a rise in temperature to 1.5% above pre-industrial levels by 2100 is still a big task. But countries like Scotland have demonstrated that targets can work. Rather than making the best the enemy of the good, the greens should be claiming the credit.
We are all environmentalists now, thanks in part to brilliant publicists like Greta Thunberg