[“Make it economically worthwhile for people to help save the planet and, just as if you’d invented a better mousetrap, they’ll beat a path to your door.”]
Cocky fellow, that Goldstein.
In a recent advice column to the United Nations well-known writer Lorrie Goldstein told the UN how to get ‘its green mojo back’. Hey, if he thinks he’s got the goods, he has the right to sell them.
However, at the same time he slagged ‘the little guy’ (you and I) when he said, “As for the rest of the world, concerns over global recession have pushed worries about global warming to, you should pardon the expression, the back burner.”
Really? “The rest of the world” is focussed entirely on the economy? The importance of the environmental file has been completely forgotten? I just think that’s what some writers would want you to think, and what many governments, corporations and branches of the media would want you to think and do as well. After all, if the majority can be encouraged to believe in a particular status quo, i.e., ‘business as usual’, ‘the economy is king’, ‘let the market place rule the day’, etc., then the great effort needed to develop a sustainable way of life doesn’t have to be considered.
Far be it from me to tell Goldstein to stick it. If he wants to play chief advisor to the UN, I’ll lend him a sharp pencil. In fact, as he advises the UN, i.e., a very small audience, he drops a few clues to the masses, i.e., the 99.99, or the big, powerful audience.
He writes, “Stop holding sustainability conferences in the world’s most exotic locales, like Rio, and stop booking yourselves into five-star hotels on everybody else’s dime. People’s BS detectors are pretty much set on “high” all the time these days, given the beleaguered state of the global economy. When you preach that everyone else needs to adopt a more modest lifestyle while living high off the public teat and emitting enough greenhouse gases to choke a whale, you undercut your credibility.”
Goldstein is telling the UN to conserve money whenever possible and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Imagine the benefits to the environment, including the whales, if the 99.99% did the same!
Goldstein writes, “Stop organizing conferences attended by 50,000 people. Seriously, 50,000?”
Goldstein is preaching about organizing things on a smaller scale. Imagine the environmental benefits if the 99.99% applied the same principle to homes, cars, food portions, clothes, shoes, recreational pursuits, etc.
Goldstein as well preaches, “Stop pushing ways to make fossil fuels more expensive (through carbon taxes and the ineffective and corrupt cap-and-trade market in Europe) and start pushing ways to make renewable energy less expensive. Make it economically worthwhile for people to help save the planet and, just as if you’d invented a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.”
Yes, less expensive renewable energy sounds delightful (though his later suggestion to dump wind and solar in favour of natural gas and nuclear power sounds less than appetizing), but while the 99.99 or the little guys wait on the UN or other powerful organizations for the arrival of reasonable quantities of cheap, sustainable, ‘economically worthwhile’ and environmentally friendly fuel, may I suggest to the little guy, the 99.99%, that we build the best mousetrap on our own an do the most economically worthwhile thing to save the planet.
Let’s reduce our spending and conserve money for the tough times ahead. By conserving money, we conserve fuel and every other precious and expensive resource. By conserving money we can pay down current deep financial and environmental debts. By conserving money we pull the environmental file off the back burner and shape the economy to fit what the planet is more capable of providing.
Do we not know the greenest product is the one we don’t buy?
If anyone wants the UN to get its green mojo back all one has to do is remind them of the obvious.
[Cartoons by G.Harrison]
***
Please click here to read The Better Mousetrap Part 1: “Conserve money, little guy”
No comments:
Post a Comment