Olly Zanetti: Cynicism aside

More like this...

Drill, baby, drill?
June 8, 2010

As cynics go, I'm one of the biggest. I tend to incorporate a hefty pinch of salt with almost everything I read, particularly when claims such as ‘revolutionary change’ or ‘dramatic improvement’ are banded about. I think this is largely the result of being a writer on environmental issues. Beneath the bold and impressive headlines of most government policies, corporate announcements and newspaper articles, you usually find something pretty flaccid and insubstantial.

I don't think such a reaction is necessarily misplaced. Not so long ago, the word ‘greenwash’ was still stumbling about in its etymological nappies (heck, I've just had to add it to the dictionary on my computer's spell checker). But nowadays it's pretty common parlance: UK newspaper The Guardian has an online greenwash column, while campaigning group CorpWatch even manages to award a bimonthly greenwash prize.

We're all used to the images of fuzzy polar bears and the obscure logos incorporating rolling fields, trees and gaily coloured flowers that supposed to encourage us to forget those silly stories we've read in the press about environmental degradation and human rights abuses, and instead feel reassured that whatever organisation we're interacting with at the time is one of the eco good guys.

So it's taken some effort to hold back the usual sighs over the past couple of weeks. Case in point: a new residential tower block in South London. Strata SE1, as its developers call it, or the Razor as everyone else does, has a host of green attributes. There's the understated ones: it's thermally efficient, its lighting is low energy and so on. But more excitingly, it has three wind turbines on top. Sure, they're not perfect. They'll only generate an estimated eight percent of the building's energy needs and if the wind blows in the wrong direction the blades won't turn at all, but it's a start.

A second case is the announcement of £4 billon of investment in tidal and wave energy in Scotland. The proposed developments are projected to create enough power for up to 750,000 homes. Given that there are about 23 million households in the UK, it seems like quite a reasonable chunk of energy when you consider that this is only one project in one relatively small area.

Cynicism aside, these are just the sort of things we need in order to have an environmentally and politically secure energy supply. We also need a mix of large and local scale renewable supplies too. Sure, we should have started building them sooner, we should be thinking bigger, doing more and working harder. But we haven't. We're at the bottom of the development curve when we should be nearing the middle. Complacency is something we definitely don't need. Examples like these are nice but they're nowhere near enough. But at least, finally, things are starting to happen.

Subscribe to HUCK for six issues
Only £20 (UK) / £43 (EU) / £58 (Rest of the World).

Cynicism aside (text) by Olly Zanetti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.