The big high-street chains are falling over themselves to 'go green'. But will any of it make any difference? Mark Lynas is far from convinced
It isn't easy being green. You have to turn the thermostat down to a chilly 18C in winter, spend ages taping up draughty windows, eat nothing but muddy parsnips all through February and wear charity shop cast-offs instead of proper clothes. Oh, the horror.
Not so fast, say today's big high-street chains. Now you can be green and gorgeous, eco-conscious and highly fashionable, simply by buying the latest climate-friendly consumer products. Never mind marching on Whitehall or Downing Street, or giving up flying: all you have to do to save the planet is shop. In today's fast-paced, mass-market society it's a tantalising vision - a march towards a low-carbon economy led by high-street spending power and requiring no great change in our affluent consumerist lifestyles. But can it happen?
Marks & Spencer certainly thinks so. Perhaps the leader in the corporate ethical revolution, M&S has launched Plan A (as in: there's no Plan B), a £200m eco-refit being rolled out across the entire company. It includes becoming carbon neutral by 2012 (equivalent, it claims, to taking 100,000 cars off the road every year), putting warning labels on air-freighted food produce, opening several model "green" stores, reducing waste eventually to zero and converting key clothing ranges to 100% fairtrade cotton. This summer the company even launched a new polyester schoolwear range made from recycled plastic bottles (normal polyester is, of course, derived from oil). Green guru Jonathon Porritt lent Plan A his support, while Greenpeace enthused that "if every retailer in Britain followed Marks & Spencer's lead it would be a major step forward in meeting the challenge of creating a sustainable society".
M&S is not alone. In recent months a green tidal wave has washed down the high street, with retailers falling over themselves to chase the climate-friendly pound, and to buff up their corporate PR credentials in the process. Just last week, Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco, said he was prepared to raise prices in his stores to deliver "a revolution in green consumption". Barclaycard, meanwhile, has launched its new Breathe credit card, which promises to donate 50% of profits to projects that tackle climate change. The DIY superstore B&Q, which pioneered sustainable wood products in the UK, is now promoting itself as a one-stop shop for anyone wanting to make their home more energy-efficient. The mobile-phone company O2 is offering special benefits for customers who hang on to their old handsets rather than upgrading when their contracts end. Sky is promoting itself as the environmental leader in the media field, and now purchases 100% renewable electricity to cover its operations. Even McDonald's - for a long time environmentalists' No 1 enemy - has joined the rush, promising to convert its 155-strong fleet of lorries to run from cooking oil recycled from the company's outlets.
As if to emphasise that the battles of the past - between people and profit, the planet and corporate greed - are over, the Climate Group charity is calling its global warming business partnership "We're in this Together". We're all on the same side now, is the subtext. We all live on one planet. Hey, even corporate CEOs love their children. Why shouldn't they help lead us towards a solution to humanity's greatest-ever crisis? As James Murdoch, widely credited with getting his father onside in the climate-change battle, wrote last year in the Guardian: "Corporations should be involved in the climate-change debate. The issue cannot be simply left to governments or supranational bodies. But those of us who believe that climate change and the growth of CO2 emissions are the biggest intergenerational issues the world faces need to take positive action."
As if to emphasise its new role as an advocate on climate change, Sky has even added a "carbon calculator" to its website, so punters can quickly work out their carbon footprints and get tips on how to reduce them. Having already cut its own CO2 emissions by 50% across all its operating sites, Sky now wants to do the same in people's living rooms, and is developing a set-top box with an automatic energy-saving standby function. Sky even sponsored "Lights Out London" on June 21, helping to persuade Londoners to darken their homes and offices for an hour to raise awareness of climate change.
Most dramatically of all, Rupert Murdoch himself has pledged to use the whole of his News Corporation (which includes Sky, as well as a large slab of the world's media) to roll out climate-change messaging to all its viewers and readers. "The climate problem will not be solved without mass participation by the general public in countries around the globe," Murdoch says. "And that's where we come in. Our audience's carbon footprint is 10,000 times bigger than ours. We want to inspire people to change their behaviour."
However, you don't have to dig very deeply to start coming across some glaring contradictions in this new corporate crusade to save the world. If News Corporation really wants to inspire low-carbon behaviour among its audience, will it stop running car adverts and other enticements to carbon profligacy? The Sky Travel section of the company's website is stuffed with low-cost holiday and city-break offers, featuring destinations as far afield as the Dominican Republic and Egypt, with nary a mention of global warming. Much of News Corporation's US media network has been at the forefront of the climate denialist backlash, from the New York Post to Fox News. Will the big boss now send instructions for a change of tone, and force erring journalists to mug up on the science?
Indeed, the deeper you look, the more absurd this all gets. If O2 wants us to keep the same mobile phone handset for longer, why do they sell phones that have such an incredibly short lifetime? With new designs and handset functionality appearing all the time - and being heavily marketed by companies such as Nokia and Motorola - ask any kid in the playground how they feel about having an out-of-date phone, even to help the environment. Or take DIY energy-efficiency superstore B&Q. Is B&Q really helping us all to save carbon when the company still sells patio heaters in virtually all of its stores? Just one patio heater will negate the climate value of half a dozen micro wind turbines - and is a whole lot cheaper, too. On the high street, Marks & Sparks may be leading the pack in flogging T-shirts made from organic, fairtrade cotton, but isn't the whole idea of fashion the antithesis of a sustainable approach? As environmental author Paul Hawken says: "Fashion is the deliberate inculcation of obsolescence." Each new trend that sweeps the high street renders the old trend obsolete. It's difficult to imagine a more wasteful system.
One of the Climate Group's partners is British Gas, which states that it has helped more than six million UK households become more energy-efficient, saving 680,000 tonnes of CO2 in the process. But why should we expect the purveyor of a product help us use less of it? British Gas makes its money by selling us energy. If there were a serious move towards households consuming less energy, then BG's profits would fall. Apply the same kind of analysis towards the entire consumer model and it becomes much more difficult to see how consuming more of anything can help us save the planet from climate chaos. The point is to consume less - and no one's going to make any money from that.
This truth is illustrated well by what's actually going on in the real world, away from corporate press releases and catchy high-street initiatives. The sheer proliferation of electronic household gadgets means that electricity use and carbon emissions are still increasing every year. Energy use in the home has doubled in the past 30 years, and is projected to rise by another 12% by 2010. Whereas once the average house might have contained a fridge, a TV and a toaster, typical household gadgets now include power tools, phone chargers, dishwashers, microwaves, DVD players, computers, satellite receivers and Wi-Fi boxes. All these use energy, however efficient they might be individually - and most aren't very. The Energy Saving Trust has calculated that all the new entertainment and consumer electronics products in British households by 2020 will need another 14 average-sized power stations just to keep them running.
Perhaps the best example of the knots that companies are tying themselves into on climate comes from the supermarket sector. Here Tesco has been a pioneer, working with Oxford's Environmental Change Institute to develop a system for putting carbon labels on all its products - in order to, in Leahy's words, "enable customers to make effective green choices". But the move has been complicated, to say the least. Take a bottle of ketchup. Should the carbon label include the nitrous oxide emissions that may have been caused by the use of fertiliser on the original tomato crop? How about the energy used in moulding the glass bottle, printing the paper label and producing the plastic seal? Much of this carbon footprint is virtually impossible to quantify, and may have taken place in other countries, in parts of the supply chain operated by sub-contractors. To figure out a carbon label for every product on the shelf would be a task of labyrinthine complexity and monumental cost.
It is also difficult to see how the supermarket system itself can be adapted to a low-carbon age. Most superstores are located on the edges of towns in order to be convenient for motorists, and are difficult or dangerous to reach by bike or public transport. Supermarkets operate a "stack 'em high, sell 'em cheap" model of retail involving highly centralised distribution and supply networks - the opposite of local shopping. Companies such as Asda and Sainsbury's will deal only with big suppliers who can offer them a reliably homogenous product at a low cost, and produce is often trucked from one end of the country to the other for processing and then back again for selling. Supermarkets thrive on the globalised food economy, where they can source the cheapest possible produce abroad, even if perfectly acceptable English substitutes are available. Once upon a time, cherries came from Kent, and apples from the Vale of Evesham. Now cherries come from Turkey, and apples from New Zealand or Chile. Supermarkets may talk about localism, but their entire business model precludes them from adopting it.
Some in the business community argue that the whole green consumerism thing is just a passing fad, a sort of climatic version of the dotcom bubble. "If people do have an environmental conscience, you can buy it for a fiver," boasts one anonymous airline executive. This cynicism seems to be backed up by a recent Mori poll, which showed that a majority of the British public still think - mistakenly - that scientists disagree on the reality of climate change, and that a significant number feel that the problem is overstated in order to raise revenue for the government. According to Phil Downing, head of environmental research at Ipsos Mori, the majority of the population are "fairweather environmentalists" who remain very reluctant to take lifestyle change seriously.
Moreover, some purportedly "green" products may be even worse than those they are intended to replace. Tesco is positioning itself as the UK market leader in selling biofuels, and already offers a 5% bioethanol mix in 185 of its petrol stations. It is also adding biodiesel pumps to 181 of its filling stations in England. However, evidence suggests that biodiesel made from palm oil feedstock may be many times more carbon intensive than even fossil fuels, once the wholesale destruction of Indonesian rainforests for palm oil plantation is factored in to the carbon equation. Ethanol is mostly made from US corn, and supply constraints have pushed up world commodity prices, already making cornflour tortillas more expensive for the Mexican poor. In a globalised food economy, the harsh reality is that cars will be fed before people if the use of biofuels becomes significantly more widespread.
Another controversial attempt to try to resolve the contradiction between consumption and sustainability is carbon offsetting. Most of the big firms that trumpet their green credentials use offsetting to some extent: Sky's claim to be "carbon neutral", for example, is justified by it having purchased carbon offsets up to the level of its calculated emissions. The insurance company MORE TH>N offsets the first 3,000 miles driven by consumers who purchase insurance through its website. The car insurance firm ibuyeco goes one better, offsetting 100% of consumers' vehicle emissions through the Carbon Neutral Company. To help offset Barclays Bank's emissions, more than 30,000 trees have been planted in "Barclays' Forests" around the country, also through the Carbon Neutral Company. But offsetting has come under fire as being little more than a conscience-salve, somewhat akin to the purchasing of papal indulgences in the middle ages.
At the heart of green consumerism lies a single unanswered question: can ever-increasing resource consumption be truly reconciled with the ecological constraints of a fragile planet? Tesco's Leahy certainly thinks it can - in fact, he goes even further, suggesting that green consumerism is a "new revolution" in sustainability. In January, Leahy gave a speech to Forum for the Future which suggested that in order to tackle climate change, "the green movement must become a mass movement in green consumption". In other words, forget politics: the best way to get business to adopt more environmentally friendly behaviour is to go shopping.
Many environmentalists are not impressed, and see green consumerism as at best a diversion, and at worst an intensification of ecologically damaging behaviour, "a pox on the planet", in George Monbiot's words. "Green consumerism is another form of atomisation - a substitute for collective action," he writes. "No political challenge can be met by shopping." Monbiot claims that "it is easy to picture a situation in which the whole world religiously buys green products and its carbon emissions continue to soar". In this world, we would deceive ourselves by driving to the supermarket in a hybrid 4x4 to buy organic carrots, somehow believing that we were part of the solution rather than part of the problem. We would continue to forget that the first word in the green mantra of "reduce, reuse and recycle" was always meant to be the most important.
Such ideas are not going to gain many converts among the corporate denizens of the high street - so one approach that has begun to catch on among the more radical elements of the green movement is to opt out of shopping altogether, and declare a "Buy Nothing Day". This year's is scheduled for November 27; last year's saw samba bands march into shopping centres in Manchester, saboteurs in Oxford put stickers on clothes in Topshop and Miss Selfridges declaring "Put me down! I won't bring you happiness", and anti-consumerist carols sung in a shopping arcade in Bristol.
Declaring that "less is more" may be appealing to some greens who are already suspicious of the consumer lifestyle, but whether a true mass movement can ever be built on a philosophy of voluntary simplicity is questionable at best. If Phil Downing from Mori is right and the majority of the population remain sceptical "fairweather environmentalists", then clearly a lot more work remains to be done.
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