Save The Planet, Lose The Guilt

To get a sense of how well-intentioned people can lose their bearings in the sea of green hype, consider the case of Fiji Water. With its bottles featuring images of pristine tropical flowers, the Fiji company started to worry when critics began bashing the environmental impact of water bottles, which will pile up in landfills for thousands of years. It got more worried when it became fashionable for consumers to calculate the carbon footprint of the products they buy—the amount of greenhouse gas emitted in manufacturing and distribution. The bottled-water business has absurdly big feet. Unlike tap water, bottled water doesn't flow freely to the people who drink it, but must be carried by gas-guzzling trucks and planes in bottles made of plastic (which is made from petroleum). So late last year, Fiji decided to meet the "water backlash" head-on with a plan to reduce the use of packaging, switch to more efficiently recyclable plastics and compensate for other carbon sins by buying offsets that would reduce emissions elsewhere. The goal was to make Fiji not only trendily "carbon neutral" but carbon negative. Never mind that most experts say that the whole premise of carbon offsets is based on dubious math (how to measure a carbon footprint?) and morals (paying others so you can pollute?). Consuming a bottle of Fiji Water will actually reduce the amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere, the company's marketing now claims.

Guilt over the environment is at a historic high, generating a flood of makeshift fixes, false claims and doomed schemes to achieve redemption. Many of these green ideas suffer mainly from overhype, and contain in them the kernel of a scheme that could work very well. In the following chapter, we look at how hype has oversold six of the hottest green ideas, and how reason can salvage the workable bits. That process is already underway for biofuels, which were originally embraced with wild enthusiasm in all its forms ("bio" sounds green and must be good, right?) but is now facing a backlash that brutally distinguishes efficient sources (cellulose) from the inefficient (corn). That same sanity check needs to be applied to everything from carbon markets (which work only in the right conditions) to the rage for hybrid cars (only half the models produce real fuel-economy gains) and the explosion of green marketing (one study finds fewer than 1 percent of the claims to be legitimate). All these cases offer important lessons on how people and governments should move forward on green issues.

The important question is: how valid are other green claims? (Before going any further, let's agree that buying more Fiji Water would not solve the world's climate problem.) If it were truly as easy as many companies claim to erase our carbon footprints, why is everybody in a tizzy about climate change? The answer is, of course, that it's not that easy. The similarity between sales of carbon offsets and medieval church indulgences is striking, not least because there's about equal proof that the two actually work.

Marketing departments don't have a monopoly on nonsolutions. Green energy guru Amory Lovins has been asserting all his life that it costs less to be green than not to be. Although Lovins's views are now "painfully respectable," as he puts it, companies that have tried to put them into practice have found it tough going. Many problems also arise from that bane of environmentalists and economists, the law of unintended consequences. Biofuels, which have driven up the price of food without doing much to slice emissions, is a classic case in point. Carbon trading, the backbone of most plans to reduce worldwide emissions, also suffers from this problem. A recent WWF report found that the EU's emissions-trading scheme could result in a financial windfall for European power companies. The system, which gives greenhouse-gas emission credits away free of charge, could lead to a €34 billion gain for Germany's coal-reliant power generators. Many experts question the extent to which it will lower carbon emissions overall.

The proliferation of green marketing hype may be a symptom of the sheer complexity of steering the global economy to a future in which per capita carbon emissions are 80 percent lower than they are now in developed countries, a widely discussed target. How much will such cuts cost? Nicholas Stern, former chief economist for the World Bank and an adviser to the British government, has put the cost of making drastic cuts in emissions at 1 percent of GDP. He arrives at this figure by assuming there's a 50 percent probability that global temperatures will rise by 5 degrees Celsius in the next century, leading to massive and costly disruptions. "The basic way of looking at it is, would you pay around 1 percent of GDP to bring down that probability from around 50 percent to 3 or 4?" he says.

The question of what it will cost to reduce carbon in the atmosphere is difficult because the answer depends on how bad we expect the effects of global warming to be. Some economists assume that global warming will be less disruptive than Stern does, effectively raising the cost of taking action now to 3 to 5 percent of GDP. Another unknown is what technologies might arise to make a carbon-free future more palatable.

Each step on the path toward a carbon-free future will bring more realism to the issue. As governments and companies get more experience with how to wring efficiencies from the economy and how to regulate green marketing claims, the Wild West character of the green business will settle down to something a bit more reliable. Even now, some green claims are legitimate, of course. Hybrid cars like Toyota's Prius and Honda's Civic Hybrid get demonstrably better gas mileage than their nonhybrid counterparts. Insulating homes is a surefire way of saving energy. Second-generation biofuels such as jatropha hold the promise of making a real dent on tailpipe emissions. Factories, cars and industries could work more efficiently than they do now, to the benefit of the environment. Between now and then, many unrealistic ideas will have to be scrapped. What follows is an attempt to separate the garbage from the ideas that should be recycled, perhaps in new forms.