Painting It Green

Being still a teenager I was learning the colors of life as a seasonal worker on a farm in Scotland. It was a great experience, first and foremost because in Poland we were still living behind the iron curtain and having the opportunity to visit "the other side" was very rare and unique. And it was a great lesson on all fronts, from self - orientation to how true economy worked. Accommodated in tents we were still finding our milk frozen on some mornings, but the prospects of the well - paid farm job (considering the black market currency conversion rates) were keeping us warm.

During the course of the season we moved from picking strawberries to raspberries and some other less profitable farm jobs. The contract obliged the farmer to keep us employed for several weeks. But that did not prevent him to announce one day there was no work anymore. No work for £1.25 (the originally agreed rate) that was. "But plenty of work for 90p" - he was encouraging us.

One of the 90p jobs was painting the farm houses. We calculated it would get us going for about a week, but to our surprise, he told us to paint only the parts visible from the road. He was standing there instructing us which areas of the walls we should leave unpainted. The farm just had to look attractive from outside, as it was up for sale.

Fast forward 40 years and I can see a very similar situation with the global "green" movement. Suddenly everyone is about sustainability and climate and all these things, mostly because this sells. And green painted (pun intended) are only the parts visible to buyers. Because green in in vogue. 

I have written a lot about electric cars, considering all the good and bad, and they are just a prime example of green-painted approach. Consumers are tricked into buying them, forgetting about where the electricity comes from or how Congolese children are forced to mine cobalt for batteries. If you don't see that, these cars do look green.

Similarly, in the EU we have recently adopted the Sustainable Finance Taxonomy, which is a guide to green investment. Among other things it permits natural gas as green, ignoring the fact that it contains methane with almost 100-fold greater climate impact compared to CO2. The key problem is that gas leaks and just this leaking methane causes more global warming than coal. But yes, gas looks greener than coal, while nuclear is dirty.