It needn't cost the earth

At the moment it's too difficult to live the green life. Obstacles should be removed and green choices made cheaper and easier

Ben Caldecott, guardian.co.uk 24 Sep 08;

The environment movement has been catapulted into the heart of UK politics over the last 3 years. It's obvious that many more people are aware of and care about climate change and environment issues than ever before. To his credit, David Cameron and his "Vote Blue, Go Green" mantra has helped to make environmentalism politically mainstream. For all the political parties, robust environment policies are now essential for electoral success.

This shift isn't unique to the UK. Throughout the world we are seeing the growing clout of environment groups in political debates. If we are to deal with the plethora of human-created problems that are destroying our planet, this shift is both positive and essential.

There are a number of barriers, however, created by government and green groups, that could undermine this progress. Just as millions of people are becoming aware of the great threats to our environment, they are being frustrated by messy policies and priest-like environmentalists.

If we don't get our act together and make environmentalism more relevant to everyday life, the population at large will stop listening. In the UK, there are a number of reasons why people could quickly become fed up with aspects of environmentalism.

Firstly, taxes which have little to do with protecting the environment have been spun as "green taxes" by the government in an attempt to make them seem more palatable to the public. This strategy has backfired. Green taxes together cost the average household £1,417 a year and public impressions are negative. According to a YouGov/Sunday Times poll (pdf) from March last year, 63% of respondents believed that global warming was just an excuse to raise taxes further.

Secondly, some environment policies, such as subsidies for first generation biofuels, have been proven to be counterproductive and excessively expensive, shortly after they were touted as a solution. This has broken down public trust in the politicians and environmentalists that advocated them.

Thirdly, on almost everything from emission reductions to biodiversity conservation, the government's green targets have comprehensively failed. This is because targets are set without considering the policies needed to implement them, are so vague as to be largely pointless or failing that, are chopped and changed when they are unlikely to be met.

Lastly, measures that are said to help the environment are made difficult and time-consuming by government. Take recycling, the options available for sorting our waste for recycling and disposal differ hugely between local authorities and the recycling of items like glass actually uses more energy than it saves. This lack of clarity and simplicity, which is by no means confined to recycling, makes doing the right thing difficult, when it should be easy. People do want to help save the planet, but they need to be empowered to do so, not frustrated and hindered.

Given these obvious failures, what could be the options for restoring trust in environmentalism and making it more relevant to the individual?

One of the most important things to demonstrate is that policies actually protect our environment cheaply and effectively. Being transparent about the costs associated with particular policies is essential. For example, the vast majority of people don't know what the cheapest ways of reducing greenhouse emissions are. If they did, they might wish to prioritise expenditure on the cheapest methods or use some abatement options and not others. The public debate on this has been mute, primarily because government and many green groups are not willing to be transparent about the options available and their respective costs and benefits.

By far the most important thing, however, is to empower people to choose environmentally sound options and relate their individual actions to the bigger environmental picture of say, climate change and biodiversity conservation. As a country, the UK does this particularly badly. The important choices people make every day concerning transport, waste disposal, recycling, what to buy, and energy usage, are often not "green" because the greenest option is difficult or impossible to choose. Government needs to seriously think about to how make the greenest options the cheapest and easiest.

The environment movement is at a crucial juncture, where global awareness of environmental threats is extremely high. Yet, that movement has so far failed to reach the heights of transparency and relevance needed to keep the struggle to protect our planet continually vivid in people's minds and central to our way of life. Environmentalism now needs to take into account of people's legitimate concerns about cost and propose cost-effective solutions to the problems we face. It must also help to make the greenest options in everyday life the easiest to choose.