Is it ethical to demand that the developing world stays poor so that we can clean up the environmental mess we have created? Solar and wind power will not bring electricity to the world’s poor; only carbon-spewing fossil fuels will do that. Is it ethical to make saving polar bears a priority when one third of the world’s population live without electricity?

Where you stand on these questions is a personal choice. Luckily, for those of you who want to put your money where your morals are, there is a burgeoning industry in ethical investment funds. There is a fund for everyone, depending on their principals.

The F&C Stewardship Growth fund, for example, forbids investment in pharmaceutical companies because of animal testing. Personally, I think it is unethical not to invest in pharmaceuticals and I despise extreme animal rights activists with a passion that I normally reserve for dictators and wife-beaters. But amid this mishmash of funds catering for every ethical whim is the key to staving off ecological Armageddon — capitalism is our best hope. Forget tree huggers and ageing radicals looking for a new cause to get angry about, profits and private enterprise will save the world, or nothing will.

The self-interest of companies and individuals needs to align with the aims of the green movement for anything to change. This is beginning to happen, as the boom in ethical funds shows. The antiglobalisation and anticapitalist protesters who have highjacked the green movement are wrong. It is deeply unfair to insist that the developing world stays poor to clean up the mess we have created. Industrialisation and development may have created environmental problems, but they are the reason you are sitting in your lovely house with lights, water and the time and energy to whinge about house prices. Only new technologies and private enterprise will create a fair solution to the current crisis.

As for the anti-capitalism green protesters, if there is so much nobility in living off the land in grinding poverty without water or electricity, why don’t they get lost and do just that, leaving those of us capable of rational thought to harness the power of free markets to tackle the environment.

Family ties will strengthen with the generation cash gap

The cheek of it. A quarter of all parents are relying on their children to help them out financially in old age, a survey from Yorkshire Bank has found.

The over50s had free education. Pensions came gold-plated from their employers. Dentists were free and promises from the welfare state were plentiful. The housing ladder was not a sick joke — you could buy a house, possibly with a garden. The over50s have lived through an unprecedented era of peace and economic prosperity.

The children they intend to sponge off, on the other hand, have an average of £13,000 in student debt when they graduate. If they can afford a flat, outside space means hanging backwards out of a window. Their teeth are rotting because they cannot afford private dentistry. They will be paying inflated taxes to meet the welfare state promises made to their parents. The number of people over the age of 40 will overtake the number of those under 40 by 2021. When it is the children’s own time to retire, the welfare state as we know it will be a historical curiosity.

But if parents are expecting help from the “Bank of Offspring” at one end, the kids are already raiding the “Bank of Mum and Dad”. A separate survey by GE Life, the retirement specialist, found that at least six out of ten over50s currently help their grown-up children. More than two thirds of the over50s received no financial help from their own parents when they were in their twenties.

There is undoubtedly a tension between generations over cash, with the baby-boomers owning a huge share of our national wealth. Changing demographics and an ageing workforce will wreak big changes on our economy, but also on how we structure ourselves as a society. The most likely outcome of this tension between generations is not conflict but a new era of cooperation. Nuclear families have been the ideal in the era of the baby-boomer, but the concept of extended families all helping each other may be due a renaissance.

Vanni drives Equitable closer to light at the end of the tunnel

Vanni Treves, the quiffed and urbane chairman of Equitable Life, breezed into the top job in 2001 with the air of a man who would sort out the mess in a heartbeat before moving on to a knighthood and a portfolio of cosy directorships.

At that stage few people recognised how intractable Equitable’s financial and legal problems were. Mr Treves could have walked away, but he stayed and the society has been transformed, with Charles Thomson, the chief executive, there as his inexhaustible sidekick.

The 50,000 pensioners moving to the safer realms of Prudential’s with-profits fund may hate Equitable’s former management for pushing them into poverty, but they owe gratitude to the current team. Their situation is still not ideal, but it is stable. The rest of the business will be sold on, too, no doubt, tying up the loose ends of Equitable for good.

It has been a thankless time for Mr Treves, who has received hate mail and worse through his letter box. Six years later and the end of the Equitable Life saga is nearly in sight.