Not surprisingly quite a lot of the more responsible capitalists have figured out what should be obvious to all. Putting your head in the sand and hoping the environmental challenge goes away is not a great long term survival strategy for business if it doesn’t work for humanity. For some environmentalists this leads to extreme cynicism and immediate accusations of greenwash. I think we need to be more discriminating than that. In my view the crisis is so extreme and so urgent that we need to take help wherever we can get it but not at the price of losing our critical faculties and believing everything we are told.
I therefore think we have to treat the efforts of individual businesses to change, reform and adapt with a mixture of encouragement and criticism that responds appropriately to the degree of honesty and usefulness of what is proposed. We can’t afford to simply reject every effort by business as a capitalist ploy. We just don’t have the luxury of enough time to take that approach. Equally we can’t allow ourselves to be used by capitalists who are merely interested in carrying on as normal and setting up a few face saving projects run by naïve green front people.
So, I fully understand the entirely correct cynicism about the efforts of Shell to pretend that it is now trying to turn itself into a modern energy company that does so much more than oil and gas and is interested in alternative energy sources and into offsetting any harm it does by planting or protecting forests. You can’t pour money into fracking, oil tar shales, and drilling the arctic and then claim your corporation understands the need to change. Nor can you apply for new oil and gas exploration licences and claim that you have grasped the nature of the crisis. It is very nice of them to try and do something for the environment but don’t expect us to fall about in gratitude over what looks more like a marketing exercise than a genuine change of direction.
Yet at the same time I genuinely believe that there are some excellent companies out there trying to make money out of transforming our economy in ways that helpfully respond to the crisis. If Greens are going to become sufficiently mainstream to win elections, take power and actually enact policies instead of preaching about them then we have to be seen as the party that supports positive business. Our aim must surely be not to smash companies that are doing useful things but rather to help them get stronger and do more useful things.
To my mind that means that we have to look to use the power of government locally, nationally and internationally to manage and guide our economy, our society and our environment in ways that make it possible for individuals, businesses and ecosystems to prosper.
Any Green government is going to have a massive change challenge on its plate. Just doing the bare minimum that is now necessary and unavoidable requires an incredibly radical programme. Our aim needs to be to win ourselves the support that enables us to implement that programme by being seen as practical people who understand how to make the future work. It shouldn’t be to come across as people who can never be worked with because they will never be satisfied with anything business does.
Take, for example, the building industry. At the moment the vast majority of companies working in it are indulging in some incredibly short-sighted behaviour that simply involves pursuing the quickest profits they can make as individual companies whilst ignoring the consequences for society. Yet we badly need that industry working with us if we are to meet housing needs in any reasonable way. Is the solution to nationalise every private building firm? I don’t think so. I think that we would lose a lot of innovative and imaginative behaviour along with the exploitative stuff. I don’t want us to attempt to recreate the clumsy Soviet state.
Better by far to change the behaviour that is encouraged and rewarded by government and then let businesses contribute to the delivery of that change. To me that means the next Green government must insist that every new building in the country generates as much power as it uses. It shouldn’t tell the industry how. A Green government should legislate to protect valuable undeveloped land but must at the same time provide incentives to help developers work on costly brown field sites. We need to help the construction industry to transform cities like Bradford, Stoke and Sunderland with co-ordinated regional policy that takes financially rewards organisations of any kind that can take disused factories and turn them into vibrant living spaces. At the same time as the Green government needs to provide funding to improve inner city education it needs to incentivise business to move to the regions. Our government needs create the business parks and information infrastructure that encourage new and enterprising companies to want to relocate to the regions. Whilst doing that we need to get electric vehicle charging points in place at real speed. What is wrong with incentivising supermarkets to do that more rapidly than they already are whilst we start work on the transport revolution that makes cars of any form much less necessary than they currently are? What is wrong with encouraging regional universities to undertake research into new products and services that we will need to remodel our exhausted former industrial cities and then getting them to work with businesses to actually deliver those products to people locally, nationally and across the world?
Put simply what I am arguing is that a Green New Deal can be good for business and good for the planet. That doesn’t mean that I don’t believe that governments should not be running some services. I would love to see the natural monopoly of railways back under government control. I am passionate about getting the NHS back to being a public service. I want to see local government building and managing council housing alongside housing associations and private companies who are prepared to build for need. Importantly I am also absolutely convinced that we can fund that easily by taking the money from the wasteful Help to Buy scheme and using it as deposit money to borrow and build.
What I am saying is that a purist position that sees business as always and everywhere the enemy of people who want the planet is likely to slow up and harm efforts to save the planet in time. We are working to a desperately short timescale in order to utterly remodel an economy that has been working without much thought for the collective consequences into one that functions positively and lives lightly within the environment. Anything we can do to win the support of the intelligent business community to work with us needs to be done.
It is time for green activists to move beyond just activism and recognise that we have to take the leadership in delivery. Sometimes, maybe even often, that is going to mean working with genuinely responsible business leaders. If we can’t make that kind of transition then we are doomed to limit ourselves to a life of making interesting criticisms from the side lines. I’d much rather we were at the heart of getting things done.