The other day I had a lapsus. I was talking to a friend and said ‘the new ministry for economic transition’ while I meant to say ‘ecological transition’. Yes, in Italy we now have this new ministry (also France and Spain have one) - charged with the big task of spending recovery fund money destined toward the green policies (which happen to be quite a lot).. so you may forgive my lapsus, but it is evident that this is as much ecological as it is economical. To achieve ecological transition it is necessary to do some tactical economical moves. No doubt about it.. One of the big buzz words that are heard these days is the ‘Just transition’ - making sure whatever move we do is going to do justice also for the ‘lower classes’ and the ‘economically disadvantaged’ ( I don’t like the word poor). Which in Italy may translate to more infrastructures such as a new high speed line all the way down to Reggio Calabria (disclaimer, I heard about this on a webinar, where official people part of the IPCC panel and one of the ministers spoke, but I can’t find it anywhere else..). As per now the high speed line only covers the centre-north, and it would make sense to level it up and give the south similar ‘opportunities’. But this a) doesn't seem to me a priority, b) is not as green as it sounds, c) will it really be 'just' ?!?! . This is a big infrastructure. A ‘grande opera’ as we like to call these things. One may hope they don’t go through protected areas. Of course, they say that any new infrastructure that 'they' will do will have to be sustainable. But how to ensure the sustainability? Looking at its life cycle. And here we go back to the issue of accounting for this, and deciding what to include in a life cycle assessment.
I am not saying that we don’t need new infrastructure at all. I don’t like to belong to the ‘no’ party. I like to belong to the ‘yes but do it well’ kind. And I am just scared that the ‘well’ that the politicians mean is far from the ‘well’ needed for the planet but is a ‘well’ masked as good for the planet which actually is only good for the pockets of the rich while they say fancy words that make people vote them while we still go towards extinction. And I am not the only one thinking that (thankfully). I have recently listened to episode 305 of the green dreamer podcast (yes yes I am a podcast addict ..) where a nice point was made about the fact that we are keeping on adding new ways of making energy, without really cutting old ones out… Maybe we lowered our dependance on coal, but it’s still being burnt somewhere. It’s like when we run out of space, maybe we think it’s time to buy a bigger house - and we have so much more space, but then we buy extra things to fill the empty space and we are back to square one (okay, maybe we don’t go around buying new houses everyday, but this applies to space on the computer, external hard disks..). We find new ways of making energy? We will find more ways of using it. On another podcast I recently listened to , where they were talking about the carbon tax the point was made that is better to do regulations and actions such as ‘not being allowed to build more fuel cars’ rather than taxing industries on products they do make. I found myself agreeing with it. Yet we know how to get rid of things: make them very expensive. Take cigarettes. In countries where buying these is extortionate (in Australia, one of the country with lowest inciders of smokers, a packet racks up at $27! Now, it may just be a correlation and may be other reasons… but still…). On the other hand, having ‘Good brands’ and ‘making sustainable choices’ may be used as an alibi to buy. You may not feel so bad about buying yet another tshirt that you don’t really need because it’s marketed as a green. But it’s still superfluous. And maybe we should just buy less? Bein ‘Zero waste’ (another fancy word these days) shouldn’t be about changing all of your appliances to lower consuming ones, selling your car to get an electric one and getting nice sets of reusable cutlery, coffee cup and water bottles . It should be more about fixing what you have and making sure it lasts , living a little frugally , using that same jar over and over. Remember it is not what companies want It is not necessarily what governments are pushing for right now - they have big economic lobbies that push for the consumerism to go on. And the production system will go on masked under ‘green transition’ , ‘green new deals’ and ‘next generation eu’ .. Instead, i really liked these policy proposals (by Amerissa Giannouli on interalia project), which i just report here, to leave you on a positive and proactive note
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