Getting a Grip on Green
admin October 26th, 2007
(Jess, Small Planet Institute Editor and Tour Manager) A recent Identity Theory post brought my attention to this TomPaine.com article – titled ‘Green Yields Green’ by Frank O’Donnell. O’Donnell cites the prevailing wisdom that dealing with the threat of global warming in a meaningful way will wreak havoc upon the market, and then he argues that it ain’t necessarily so:
…We rarely hear the flip side of the issue—that new limits on heat-trapping emissions not only are needed to protect the planet, but actually could become an economic boon for companies smart enough to develop cleaner products.…Unless you work in suburban Philadelphia, where Johnson Matthey has a factory, you may not have heard of this company, but I guarantee you are breathing easier because of it: The company makes catalytic converters and other pollution control devices. Carson recalled that tough Clean Air Act and California emission standards were “instrumental for creating the global market” for these products. By contrast, he noted that a voluntary approach alone “weakens the investment case for new technologies and slows down technical progress.”
What this means is that our collective creativity can be used at once in service of both environmental health and economic prosperity. In Germany, for example, feed-in laws rewarding renewables have already created over 200 thousand jobs. And this kind of frame shift - this acknowledgment that, approached in the right manner, it is possible to build social and economical frameworks that are effective because of and not in spite of their environmental sustainability - is precisely what Frances discusses in Getting a Grip.
