Is it easy being green?

It’s about 30 months since we sold our family car. Do I miss it?

Very occasionally.

Certainly not day to day, or even week to week. The main challenge is our usual holiday of a couple of weeks in a remote holiday cottage which has become more tricky logistically. But I never find myself going “I wish I hadn’t sold my car!” and certainly when I see people stuck in a traffic jam on their daily commute, I’m glad I’m no longer in that lifestyle. I stopped commuting 20 years ago after a very near miss on a dual carriageway and our diesel car spent so much of its time on the kerb outside our house that we kept having battery failure problems.

“How do you do your family shopping?” people ask. The big shop we get delivered, topped up with daily purchases from the corner shop or a nearby supermarket on foot, and I do the occasional medium-sized shop using our cargo bike, usually if we’re having people around for dinner. I hate doing a big supermarket shop, and love cycling, so I prefer this model.

What I’m getting at is that my car-free status could be seen as some eco-virtue signalling when it really isn’t a sacrifice. And yet so many people from across the eco-spectrum from deep green to populist climate denialists keep framing Sustainability as a sacrifice. Sacrifice is certainly the assumption in the whole “The UK is only responsible for 1% of emissions so we should increase North Sea oil & gas exploration” fallacy.

Look at how the global economy is unfolding. Investments in clean energy continue to outstrip those in fossil fuels. Electric vehicles are the only element of car sales which are expanding at a time of contraction and studies have shown that owners like them (many accelerate like the proverbial off a shovel). Countries like Pakistan, Nigeria and Zimbabwe are installing incredible numbers of solar panels and increasing numbers of battery systems, so their development is bypassing the centralised fossil-fuel power of Western countries. And yet the assumption that clean energy is a sacrifice is pervasive – at the start of this year I marked about 50 student assignments on renewables and third world development and a majority fell into the trap of assuming that fossil fuel power systems could be rolled out more cheaply than renewables (and forgot about fuel costs, whoops!). If I ever find the tutor… (cough 😳 etc)

Meanwhile Donald Trump is throwing $625 million in subsidies at supposedly cheap coal power and chucking legislative sticks in the spokes of clean power projects as the US continues inexorably to go fossil-free. The anti-renewables voices inevitably call for more nuclear, the most expensive form of power generation – who is expected to pay for that? Or hydrogen for that matter.

Yesterday I was reading How Business for Good Went Bad in Fast Company – it’s an interesting narrative on how ‘doing well by doing good’ rose and fell over the last decade (and some business leaders do not come out of it well). The author started to annoy me by using the level of a ‘sustainability premium’ that consumers were willing to pay for products that didn’t destroy the planet as a measure of public interest, before correcting to point out that many successful green businesses were finding ways to compete on what we call the 3Ps: performance, price and planet. Green premiums will always mean niche products, but like new gizmos in the motor industry, these premium features often become standard practice over a couple of innovation cycles as technologies and supply chains mature.

Put simply, whether you are selling people clean power, transportation, heating, consumer goods or your organisational Sustainability Strategy, our ultimate aim must be to make it cheaper, better and/or more convenient than the status quo. Buying into the sacrifice fallacy will get us nowhere, let’s change the narrative and do good things excellently.