So, Sir Terry Leahy, the retailer who has driven so many thousand independent shopkeepers to extinction, who pays small farmers pocket money for their food, whose belching lorries clog up our roads, whose 1,900 Tesco shops litter our high streets with nasty red, white and blue plastic fascias, who flies in all those bloody bobby beans all the way from Kenya, is telling us that he’s changed.
He has pledged to chuck half a billion pounds at green measures such as developing a carbon calorie counter system on 70,000 items and donate £5m a year to help fund academic research into greener consumption. In fact, from now on we are formally to refer to him as the People’s Green Grocer.
This may sound utterly super and life-changing for Leahy but 1) we’ve been here before; 2) I don’t think that word green tells us much any more; and 3) I’m not sure I’m buying it.
Like President Bush, who is bankrolled by the oil, gas and coal industries and refused to acknowledge global warming in his first six years in office, and like Sir Richard Branson, who has made a fortune out of aviation (ie, by efficiently squirting CO2 and burnt kerosene straight into the atmosphere), Leahy is just the latest in a line of environment-unfriendly big businessmen suddenly to go green.
“There aren’t many things that keep me awake at night, but this is one,” Leahy said last week, without mentioning — strangely enough — that on Tuesday the Competition Commission happens to unveil the “emerging thinking” of its lengthy inquiry into the monopolistic impact of the UK groceries market following the closure of 8,600 local independent stores since 2000. Talk about needing some good publicity.
Be that as it may, Leahy’s pearly-gates conversion reminds me of the letter Branson sent round last September. In it, he called on industry leaders to reduce aviation’s impact on the environment, and revealed that his fleet of aircraft would henceforth be towed to the runway, thus cutting down on taxi-ing and hanging about in queues with the engines running, reducing on-the-ground emissions by 50% (hmm, doesn’t do much about what happens in the air, does it, Richard?).
It also nicely tees up Bush’s rumoured 11th-hour conversion from oil to that home-grown biofuel ethanol — a subject he is tipped to enlarge on in this week’s state of the union address to the US, a country he admitted this time last year was “addicted to Middle East oil”. Oh yes. And it pits Tesco against Marks & Spencer, a company that jumped on the green bandwagon a bit earlier.
Now, forgive me if I sound cynical, but I can’t help but wonder. It somehow reminds me of what Michael Green, (former boss of David Cameron at Carlton) mischievously said when I was mentioning the Tory leader. “Ask away,” he said. “Go on! I’ve always been fascinated by, er, green issues.”
If Tesco is now green, if Bush is now green, if fashion brands like Diesel are green, if even a new 4x4 sport utility car is green (hello, 3.3 litre Lexus RX 400h hybrid) I’m not sure I know what green means any more. I’m not sure I want to call myself green, even. It’s just not cool.
It has become so overused and mainstream a term that it has become almost meaningless, and therefore open for us all to use for our own purposes. In fact, as writer and academic Anthony Giddens has argued, it wasn’t the green movement that alerted us to climate change, but scientists, and on that basis, we should all decide to be geeks or nerds, not greens. But despite Giddens’s objections, it seems that everything must still be green, from organic cotton baby clothes from Green Baby, to funerals where the deceased is buried in woodland to the cheeping of birdsong in a biodegradeable coffin.
Yes, everything is either green or low carbon or low impact, and if it’s not green it’s organic. Twenty years ago greed was good, and now green is good. In fact green is more than good. Green is not a choice — it is a duty, even a creed.
Last week a leading climatologist on the ever-gripping Weather Channel argued that any weather forecaster who questioned the notion that global warming was a man-made phenomenon should be stripped of their professional status. Heidi Cullen, who presents a segment called the Climate Code, demanded that her peers be expelled from the American Meteorological Society if they even suggested that climate change might be caused by normal cyclical weather patterns. This echoed Al Gore, who made the documentary An Inconvenient Truth and often refers to “global warming deniers”.
Now I don’t happen to be a global warming denier, not that it matters. Rather the reverse. We were all early converts in my family. My father Stanley is an environmentalist and campaigner, and has written many exciting books on pollution, population control and the environment.
But still, I’m not sure I’m sucking up the hot air emitted by the latest crop of Jolly Green Giants like Leahy, M&S’s Stuart Rose and BP’s Lord Browne, let alone Bush and Branson, and this is why.
As sales and surveys show, consumers are happy to pay more to acquire goods and services that reflect their values and concerns. As we are all greens now, it is axiomatic that sales of green/organic/carbon-reduced products and services are set to soar. And here we come to the point.
Changes in policy — whether retail or political — seem to be driven not solely by legitimate anxiety about the planet, the species, our children’s children, and so on, but also by capturing market share. As Nick Hurd, the MP who last week presented the Sustainable Communities Bill, which is campaigning against clone-town Britain (supported by 400 local and national organisations), crisply said of the worthy-sounding Tesco initiative to make us a nation of green consumers:
“I smell a buck in it.”
He’s right, I’m afraid. Just as economic considerations lay behind the foot-dragging on global warming, so will the sheer economic costs of failing to respond to it dictate decision making.
So retailers who offer consumers an ethical shopping experience rather than one that threatens to implicate them in the wholesale destruction of the high street and small producers will do well. Which is why, of course, Leahy is playing catch-up with Rose, and why environmental technologies are the hot stocks on the world’s stock exchanges.
In fact, all this has made me wonder whether the recent global “green revolution” that has swept the right-thinking world in such a short time is turning into a greenwash: a cycle that will basically serve to deliver more products to more consumers, and greater value to shareholders, and do not that much good to the planet.
But I hope not.
rachel.johnson@sunday-times.co.uk
