From the Harry Enfield Television Show

I like a good, positive contrarian argument. You won’t have seen anything from me about Earth Day yesterday as I believe Earth Day and all other awareness Days, Weeks, Months etc should be gently laid to rest. One of my favourite Sustainability books is the God Species by Mark Lynas which takes aim at many Sustainability sacred cows. And many of my own approaches to Sustainability, not least Green Jujitsu, flip normal practice on its head.

All of this is grist to the mill of the evolving approach to Sustainability and I believe we as a sector can be far too conservative in our approach. We need to constantly challenge ourselves and our orthodoxies to make sure we’re accelerating progress.

But when does it become damaging?

Dale Vince of Ecotricity has hit the headlines by suggesting scrapping heat pump subsidies and putting the money into the defence budget. This is dodgy on three grounds – one he mistakenly thinks the future of domestic heating is biomethane (we’ll never produce enough to hit Net Zero), secondly he has substantial financial interest in slowing the shift to heat pumps, and thirdly he’s indulging in the same anti-heat pump rhetoric as the climate change denying/fossil fuel promoting brigade. And they’re lapping it up.

And I suppose that’s the litmus test: if you’re being quoted approvingly by the ‘do nothing’ brigade then you’ve stumbled from being part of the solution to part of the problem.